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NATIONAL LIFE

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UNIVERSITIES AND NATIONAL LIFE

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UNIVERSITIES AND :

NATIONAL LIFE -VAi!

FOUR ADDRESSES TO STUDENTS

BY VISCOUNT HALDANE

SECOND EDITION

LONDON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET

1911

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

^^ I. The Soul of a People 1

II. The Calling op the Pkeacher .... 33

J ill. The Dedicated Life 65

"' IV. Great Britain and Germany : A Study in

National Characteristics , , . .111

SS>

THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

An Address delivered to the Students of the University
College of Wales, at Aberystivyth, on lAth October
1910.

THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

You are students of the University of Wales,
and I am a Scotsman whom you have invited
here as being not unfamiliar with the con-
ditions of University life. It is in the main
with what University life can mean that I
shall concern myself in this address. Of the
general affairs of Wales and of Scotland I
shall not speak. They remain to be topics
of discourse by those, and they are numerous,
who are well qualified to deal with them. I
wish to direct your attention to something
which seems to me to touch the foundations
of national affairs at an even deeper level than
that of ordinary politics.

There is a characteristic which the people
of Wales and the people of Lowland Scotland,
differing profoundly in other respects, appear
to possess in common. They are both idealist
in their cast of mind. You of Wales have the

4 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

gift of imagination. It has enabled you to
strike out some distinctive lines for yourselves
in your higher education and in your religion.
You are not easily daunted by difficulties, and
you act together with an enthusiasm which
penetrates to the humblest classes of the
community. The common effort made to
develop yom^ higher schools and University
Colleges has been an effort which in reality
owed much of its success to the response of
those who work with their hands. In the
soul of your people there is what George
Buchanan called a prcefervidum ingeniiim, a
fire which is more Celtic than it is Saxon.
We Lowland Scotsmen are also at heart
idealist, but our idealism is of a different kitid.
Our temperament is reflective rather than
imaginative. We move easily in the current
of abstract discussion, and we are tenacious
of intellectual purpose. The Treatise of Human
Nature^ the Wealth of Nations, and Sartor
Resartus are books typical of a characteristic
form of Scottish idealism. Probably no other
part of the United Kingdom could have pro-
duced writers of this type, and, along with them,
men like John Knox, and the Covenanters,

THE CELTIC ELEMENT 5

and Dr Chalmers. I think those to whom I
have referred are at least as distinctively
representative of Scottish habits of mind as
are Bmnis and Scott. For they are the
spiritual children of a race which loves abstract
speculation as you love music and verse. In
the case of both races there is present the
spirit of idealism — idealism which when it comes
to the surface flows in different channels, but
is not the less on that account idealism.

To Ireland I can only allude in passing. It
seems to me that in reality we study the Irish
people too little to appreciate properly what
the British nation has owed and to-day owes
to that strain of Celtic blood. Differences of
religion and habit of mind, and irritation over
friction in the machinery of Government, have
encouraged the Anglo-Saxon community in
these islands to give the rein in the case of
Ireland to our national habit of not taking
the trouble that is necessary to understand
those who have great gifts, but gifts that are
not like our own.

Now I come to England, and here my
patriotism lays me under no illusion. The
Welsh, the Irish, and the Scots have this in

A 2

6 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

common, that in different ways they have had
much to complain of in the attitude towards
them of the English. Even when civilisation
in England was a long way ahead of civilisation
in other parts of the United Kingdom — as it
was, for instance, when Sir Robert Walpole
was the real ruler of the country — we can
gather from the not too sympathetic pages of
Macaulay how the English habit of mind
worried and galled Celt and Scot alike. And
yet, speaking for myself and as a Scotsman,
I most genuinely admire this dominant race,
even in their Philistinism. They think ahead
but little. They are worse at organising for the
fulfilment of definite ends beyond those of the
moment than almost any of their rivals. And
yet they hold their own in the world, and I
see no indication that they are in the least
degree failing to hold it. They are almost
always late in coming on the ground, but
when they do come they set to work silently
and with courage. They proceed with marvel-
lous initiative to repair their errors of omission,
and they drop their practice of saying depressing
things about themselves and their institutions
until they see themselves again on the top.

DELIBERATION AND ACTION 7

When a new invention, like the submarine or
the motor, comes to light, the Englishman is
usually behind. Give him a few years and
he has not only taken care of himself in the
meantime, but is generally leading. As it was
with these inventions, so I suspect it will prove
to be with aircraft.

Being at present charged with some part of
the endeavour to see that we catch up other
nations in matters of science applied to defence,
I have experience of what happens when the
British people are exhorted to make efforts in
times of tranquillity. The reply is invariably
that there is no necessity to worry them, and
that the one thing needful is for the Govern-
ment to spend the taxes plentifully, and to
damn the differential calculus emphatically.
Yet this very people, when it was caught un-
prepared and threatened with defeat a few
years ago in South Africa, calmly put its
shoulder to the wheel, and without a groan
set itself to get through a situation which
would have appalled a nation with a more
nervous temperament.

Well, the English are good partners for you
Celts and for us Lowland Scots in our common

8 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

business enterprises. All we need ask of them
is to leave us to manage our purely domestic
affairs and to conduct our family worship in
our own fashion. They are on these condi-
tions valuable comrades. And let us remember
that they go on periodically producing from
among themselves individualities of very great
power, individualities that could only spring
from a very great race. Shakespeare and
Milton, Cromwell (whom I hold to have been
in spirit, at all events, a most genuine English-
man, though I know you claim him as Welsh),
Chatham, Nelson and Wellington, Newton and
Darwin, these are indicative of a rich soil, a
soil which I believe to be as rich and pro-
ductive to-day as it ever has been.

The real question is how, in this remark-
able partnership, we may best help each
other through the medium of our special
aptitudes, and develop not only the partner-
ship but ourselves. Now the Englishman is
short of ideas, so it seems to me, more than of
anything else, and it is just ideas that we two
races, in our different fashions, can put into
the common stock. By ideas I mean large
permeating ideas — ideas such as have been the

THE MEANING OF "SOUL" 9

origin of the remarkable power which the
Welsh and Scottish Universities are showing
to-day of penetrating the people around them
with the influence of the higher learning.
And in the rest of this address I propose to
confine myself to the very illustration which
the higher education aff'ords, because I believe
that this is an illustration which throws light
on every other part of the field of work. The
development of the true spirit of the
University among a people is a good measure
of the development of its soul, and conse-
quently of its civiKsation.

I have taken as the title of this discourse,
"The Soul of a People." The expression
"soul" has a pretty definite meaning. It
does not signify to-day a sort of thing existing
apart from the body, the "animula, vagula,
blandula" of the Emperor Hadrian's famous
verses. Nor has it its seat in any particular
place in the body corporate. And just as this
is true of the physical organism, so it is true of
the State. The soul of a people is to be looked
for in no one class or institution. The soul of
a human being is the highest form of his
activity, what permeates the members and

10 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

makes their life consist in belonging to the
whole of which they form parts. Separated
from that whole they cannot live. Although it
is nothing outside or detached from these parts
or members of itself, it is everywhere present
in them. It is their formative principle, their
ideal, the end which they fulfil, and which
determines them, not as a cause operating
from without, but as a purpose working itself
out from within their course of development
from birth to death. It preserves the unity of
the organism and guides it along that course,
notwithstanding that the material of that
organism does not remain the same but is
constantly changing. It is the higher and
intelligent life of the organism without which
it could not be a human being. More than
two thousand years ago Aristotle discovered
this truth, and called the soul the " entelechy "
of the body.

Now what is true of the human organism is
true of the State. The soul of a people is just
its entelechy, and the higher manifestations of
its soul afford a test of the standard of civilisa-
tion to which that people has attained. The
capacity for learning and the consequent

DUTIES OF THE STUDENT 11

development of the University spirit are of
course no exclusive test. Literature and art,
science and religion, may advance independ-
ently of Universities. But on the whole and
as a rule, the development proceeds pari
passu. And to maintain the Universities of
the country at a high level is thus an act of
high patriotism on the part of the citizens.
But not only the citizen but the student him-
self has a deep responsibility here. When the
latter goes to the University, he is an adult
and is treated as being such. He has conse-
quently not only rights as a member of the
University, but duties towards the institution
to which he belongs. It is his privilege to be
called on to keep high the level of its tone,
and to contribute ideas for its development.
To each student comes the opportunity for
influencing those around him ; in other words,
for leadership. Moving his fellow- students
individually he moves the University, and so
in the end moves the State itself. Therefore
I would impress on you who are here before
me the reality of your duty and of its import-
ance. Your way is clear — to get the best you
can for yourselves in this generally unique

12 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

period of your lives, and to strive with all your
power to make the fullest use of what you
have got, and to impart it to those around you.
It is so that you will begin to fulfil the duty
you have to discharge now, and will have to
discharge still more later on in life — of striving
to develop the soul of the people to whom you
belong.

To the question how you may best equip
yourselves for this endeavour, my answer is
an old one — By getting ideas, ideas which, as
has been said, have hands and feet, ideas
which not only transform that on which they
are brought to bear, but in doing so expand
themselves and their meaning. For nothing
is so expansive as the train of thought
suggested by an idea that is really great ; and
if it has once been fully grasped, nothing
transforms the whole outlook in the fashion
that its suggestive power does. Now, to get
great ideas we require great teachers. These
teachers may be living persons with whom we
come in daily contact, or they may be dead
and yet teach us through great books which
they have given to the world. In whichever
way it comes, the teaching required is that

THE HIGHEST HAPPINESS 13

which guides to a large outlook and to none
but a large outlook. Yet after all it is only to
a limited extent that the teacher, be he living
or one who though dead yet speaks, can
mould his student. There is no royal road to
learning. The higher it is the harder is the
toil of the spirit that is required for its attain-
ment. But this toil brings with it happiness.
As we advance along the path, we see more
and more new territory to traverse, new
heights to scale, heights which are accessible
only by patient labour, but the scaling of
which promises us a new sense of possession.
In all this there is much of the sweet in sad
and the sad in sweet. Yet the mere endeavour,
even apart from the result, brings its reward.
There is a passage in Romola in which
George Eliot describes this kind of inexperi-
ence of the scholar : — " We can only have the
highest happiness, such as goes along with
being a great man — by having wide thoughts,
and much feeling for the rest of the world as
well as ourselves ; and this sort of happiness
often brings so much pain with it that we can
only tell it from pain by its being what we
would choose before everything else, because

14 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

our souls see it is good." For him who seeks
to live at the higher levels of life, be it in
learning or in art or in conduct, adversity has
its uses. It detaches his mind, and develops
in it the sense of that freedom that can only
come when the spirit is tied to no one
particular possession, but has grown every-
where capable of rising to freedom. It is hard
for the rich man, who cannot free himself from
the obsession of his riches and treat them as a
means to an end, to reach the kingdom of
heaven. On the other hand, the mind that is
really free is the mind that chooses to submit
itself to toil and discipline, to renounce much,
and to pursue its course, not as an arbitrary
course, but as one of self- development in
accordance with law and principle. If we
would succeed, nay, if we would be free from
what is the worst burden of all, slavery to an
arbitrary will which seeks only the gratification
of its immediate impulses, we must learn to
renounce and to limit ourselves. We must
accept the negative, not to sit down helpless
before it, but, in order to conquer, rise
above it to a larger outlook brought about by
what we started from, being enriched by its

THE HABIT OF CONCENTRATION 15

incorporation. Just as the body grows by
assimilating inorganic and foreign material
from the environment and transforming it to
its own uses, just as the social organism
develops in proportion as it gives rights to new
classes of citizens and brings within itself and
raises to a higher level and sense of responsi-
bility those who in a previous generation
would have been treated as unworthy of civil
rights, so the mind of the scholar grows. It
grows in strength and breadth as it assimilates
what it costs a hard struggle and much
renunciation of passing pleasure to grasp.
But what is thus grasped is, in the process of
being so grasped, transcended and freed from
the appearance of being foreign and uninterest-
ing. This is the meaning of the conquest of
the negative, and without the conquest of the
negative there is no real growth, intellectual
or moral. If I may presume to suggest some-
thing to those of my hearers who are students,
it is to acquire as early in life as you can a
business-like habit of concentration. There
are people who say that youth is the time to
enjoy life, and that therefore much of youth
should be reserved for enjoyment while that is

16 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

still possible. Now I am far from suggesting
to you that you should cut yourselves off from
the resources of amusement. On the contrary,
I think that capacity for these forms a part of
the widest life. What is called recreation has
a detaching and enlarging quality. But do
not jump from this to the conclusion that
apolausticism is a safe philosophy of conduct.
In these days everything is so speciaHsed and
so difficult that nothing short of concentration
of a close kind is enough. No one can in our
time accomplish the production of any solid
contribution to the common stock of ideas
unless he is prepared to devote years to pre-
paring himself and his whole soul for work
which will be his chief interest and chief
amusement. I do not mean that he will look
on golf as a penance, but equally he will not
feel it to be a temptation. These diversions
had better not be left to become ends in them-
selves. They are apt to take a very firm hold
on us Britons, a race peculiarly qualified to
indentify life with sport. But life is short, and
there is too much to be got into it, if it is to be
fully lived, to admit of anything being made
its chief end, consciously or unconsciously,

THE SENSE OF FINE QUALITY 17

except that which weighs most when put into
the ultimate balance. It is quality as well as
quantity that counts.

What we have really got to do, all of us, is
to keep keen our sense of fine quality. This
sense is easily blunted. And we cannot rely
on abstract maxims as that to which we can
safely look to keep it whetted. Prigs are
easily manufactured, and so are pedants, and
each sort is apt to pass with itself and with
none other for genuine. The surest way is to
select, and concentrate on what is selected,
and then to follow up that concentration by
trying to work with passion. Without passion,
said a famous critic of life, nothing great has
ever been accomplished. It is no very dififer-
ent saying from one which is better known,
that genius is "an infinite capacity for taking
pains." Of course, in talking to you who are
here, when I speak of selecting an object of
study and concentrating on it with passion, I
do not mean any object. I mean one which,
being your free choice, is high enough in
quality to admit of the dedication of life to it
— for a time or indefinitely. And here there
is another snare to be avoided. Narrow and

B

18 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

abstract views, alike in the selection of the
object and in the pursuit of its study, have to
be avoided. The sense of proportion must be
present in the mind of the most faithful of
students, if he is not to be preyed on by the
imps of Comedy. That is why it is good to
have before one's mind the figure of some
great man who has been above this kind of
criticism, in that his life and his study have
been so simple and transparent that we are
compelled not only to admire but even to
reverence them. A Berkeley, a Newton, or
a Darwin gives one this sense. Their striving
seems so genuine as to suggest unconscious-
ness not only of any personal ambition but
even of self It is figures like these that
inspire the University student, and that
suggest to him great ideas. In the books
they have written, and in the traditions of
their personal lives, he finds leadership. In
close spiritual contact with such figures he
gains the inspiration which will in his own
way make him a leader in some circle which
may be great or may be small, but which will
look to him who is thus inspired as a leader.
By such examples, and through the training

SUPER-MEN 19

which close spiritual contact with such
examples give, the soul of a people grows.

In the pursuit of learning, not less than in
the management of the affairs of nations, stress
ought to be laid on hero-worship. Nothing is
more stimulating to him who is striving to
learn, nothing increases his faith in what is
possible, so much as reverence, though it may
come only through books, for the personality
of a great intellectual and moral hero. Of
those heroic leaders there are different kinds,
and their common quality is the possession
of some kind of genius. An Alexander and
an Aristotle, a Napoleon and a Goethe, are
super-men, but super- men in virtue of wholly
different gifts from above. The characters of
its greatest men are the greatest books the
world possesses, and we do well to be con-
stantly reading in them. Such records always
stimulate, and sometimes inspire. They are
priceless for the true student, for they are his
best guides in the search for ideas. Some
names come into my mind as typical of what
I meant when I was speaking to you of
idealism, ideahsm of the special kind which
can bring to unity faith and thought, religion,

20 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

morality, and art. There are men who have
consecrated their souls to this great endeavour,
and, if the finiteness which is of the essence of
humanity has made it necessary that we should
pass beyond their modes of expression, they
have none the less succeeded in carrying the
advance of the Spirit towards truth a stage
farther. None of us can read the account of
the last hours of Socrates which Plato puts
into the lips of Phaedo, without recognising
that here was one whose words are a per-
manent possession for mankind. He lived in
constant striving to reach the truth, and for
what he held against the Athenian citizens to
be the truth he suffered death at their hands.
When the hour of sunset was near, so Plato
tells us, the jailer came to him to announce
to him that now he must die, and made this
speech : — " To you, O Socrates, whom I know
to be the noblest and gentlest and best of all
who ever came to this place, I will not impute
the angry feelings of other men, who rage and
swear at me when, in obedience to the authori-
ties, I bid men drink the poison — indeed I am
sure that you will not be angry with me ; for
others, as you are aware, and not I, are

SOCRATES AND THE CUP 21

the guilty cause. And so fare you well, and
try to bear lightly what needs must be ; you
know my errand." Then bursting into tears,
he turned away and went out. Socrates
looked at him and said : "I return your good
wishes, and will do as you bid ! " Then turning
to us, he said : '* How charming the man is :
since I have been in prison he has always been
coming to see me, and at times he would talk
to me, and was as good as could be, and now
see how generously he sorrows for me — but
we must do as he says ; Crito, let the cup be
brought." "Yet," said Crito, "the sun is still
on the hilltops, and I know that many an one
has taken the draught late, and after the
announcement has been made to him, he has
eaten and drunk, and enjoyed the society of
his beloved ; do not hasten then, there is still
time." Socrates replied : " Yes, Crito, and they
of whom you speak are right in doing thus, for
they think that they will gain by the delay ;
but I am right in not doing thus, for I do not
think that I would gain anything by drinking
the poison a little later; I should only be
sparing and saving a life which is already
gone, and could only despise myself for this."

B 2

22 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

— Phaedo tells of the final scene, and how
Socrates alone was calm. And he concluded :
'^ Such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend,
whom I may truly call the wisest, and justest,
and best of all the men whom I have ever
known."

Another great figure is that of Immanuel
Kant. One thinks of him as one of the most
conscientious searchers after the truth that
the world has ever seen. The moral law
dominated in him both heart and brain. I
have been in Konigsberg, and have stood by
the grave where he was laid, and have tried to
realise something of the personality and
surroundings of one who lived a life concen-
trated on a single end — the search after truth.
It is difficult at this distance of time to recall
the tremendous impression which Kant made
on contemporary Europe — Schiller tells us
that a new light was kindled for mankind.
Pilgrims came from great distances to gaze on
the features of their revered teacher, himself
the most modest and retiring of men. One
enthusiast, a philosopher of some distinction,
declared that in a hundred years Kant would
have the reputation of Jesus Christ. But

IMMANUEL KANT 23

when we forget these extravagances, and look
at the figure of Kant in the dry light of the
judgment of posterity, it still stands out as
deeply impressive. Whether one turns to the
theoretical or to the practical side of his
system, his writing seems to have a quality
which is described in his own words when
defending himself in the closing years of his
life against a narrow-minded minister of
Frederick William, King of Prussia : "I have
always conceived the Judge in myself as
standing by my side during the composition of
my writings, so as to keep myself free, not
only from every soul-destroying error, but
even from every carelessness in expression
which might cause offence." He left the
world a stage farther on in the deeper sort of
knowledge than he found it. In the words of
one of his biographers : '^For those who have
learned Kant, many questions have ceased to
trouble ; many are bright with a light unknown
before ; and others are at least placed in a fair
way for further solution."

I will try to sketch for you another of those
"Saints of Eationalism," to use a phrase
which Mr Gladstone employed about John

24 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

Mill. And this time I will take the figure of
one who lived down to our own time and
whom I myself knew, a figure not of the very
first order, it may be, but that of a great man,
one who, himself a German, was able to call a
halt to the powerful movement of German
Idealism, and to force its advocates to subject
their principles to a fresh and searching
scrutiny. Hermann Lotze has become very
well known in this country, partly by direct
study, and not a little by the book written on
his philosophy by Professor Henry Jones, one
of the most brilliant thinkers whom your
higher learning in Wales has produced.
Lotze's doctrine was that abstract thought is
by itself powerless to penetrate to the inner
kernel of reality, and that the ultimate
criterion of truth must be looked for in the
highest forms of emotion, and in the faith
which has its origin in that emotion. He
sought to limit the region in which the power
of mere logical reasoning can give results.
He led the revolt, an almost passionate revolt,
against what he believed, I think wrongly, to
be the outrage committed by Hegel and his
disciples against the riches and warmth of

THOUGHT AND REALITY 25

reality. "Du hast sie zerstort, die schone
Welt," cried out the chorus of Spirits to Faust,
and to the apostles of Wissenschaft and
Wissenschaft alone, Lotze cried it out not less
vehemently. He refused to identify reality
with thought, or to reduce the world to what
Mr Bradley has called an "unearthly ballet of
bloodless categories." On the positive side
he asserted that feeling was the source of the
ideal of knowledge, and that, with no other
powers than those of mere intellect, we should
not reach that ideal or even seek it. The
good is a higher category than the true, and
comprehends and exhausts its meaning.

I will quote the words in which he sums
up in the concluding paragraphs of his
Mikrokosmus the results of his investigations :
''It has seemed to us that everywhere the
universal was inferior as compared with the
particular, the class as compared with the
individual, any state of things insignificant as
compared with the good arising from its
enjoyment. For the universal, the class, and
the state of things belong to the mechanism
into which the Supreme articulates itself; the
true reality that is and ought to be is not

26 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

matter and is still less Idea, but is the living
personal Spirit of God and the world of
personal Spirits which He has created. They
only are the place in which Good and good
things exist ; to them alone does there appear
an extended material world, by the forms and
movements of which the thought of the
Cosmic whole makes itself intelligible through
intuition to every finite mind." Knowledge
finds its goal in Truth, Feeling in the Good, or
Supreme, worth. " Taking Truth," he says,
"as a whole, we are not justified in regarding
it as a mere self-centred splendour, having no
necessary connection with those stirrings of
the soul from which, indeed, the impulse to
seek it first proceeded. On the contrary,
whenever any scientific revolution has driven
out old modes of thought, the new views that
take their place must justify themselves by the
permanent and increasing satisfaction which
they are capable of affording to those spiritual
demands, which cannot be put off or ignored."
"Rather let us admit that in the obscure
impulse to treat higher aspects of things
which we sometimes glory in, and sometimes
feel incapable of rising to, there is yet a dim

THE REALISM OF LOTZE 27

consciousness of the right path, and that every
objection of science to which we attend does
but disperse some deceptive light cast upon
the one immutable goal of our longings by the
changing standpoints of growing experience."^
Every man, said Emerson, is born to be either
a Platonist or an Aristotelian. Every man
has a tendency either towards Idealism or
towards a Eealism which may or may not
be such as the Realism of Lotze. He has
produced a deep effect on German thought,
and his influence has crossed the seas to
Britain and America. The theological teach-
ing of his fellow-professor Ritschl, and of
Harnack later on, seems to me to be in a
large part the outcome of the principles of
Lotze. They turned away from the contro-
versies about the Gospels and the investiga-
tions of the Tubingen School, to seek in the
origins of Christianity for a foundation which
should require no metaphysical assistance, but
should be its own witness. Whether they
have succeeded time will show. It may be
that they and Lotze too will turn out only to
have opened anew the door to scientific doubt.

1 Mikrokomus, Introduction.

28 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

But their work has been a great work, alike
in the extent of its influence and in the spirit
in which it was conceived.

I have spoken to you of Lotze— not merely
because he was a notable figure, representative
of some of the finest qualities of the soul of
the great German people. He was great as a
teacher, whether or not his thinking was more
than that of a profound critic of other systems.
He was great equally as a moral figure, a
personality with which none could be in
contact without being influenced by it.
Thirty-six years ago I was bidden to choose
for myself whether I would go to Oxford
or to a German University, and I chose
Gottingen because Lotze was there. I was
only seventeen, little more than a boy. I
remember vividly how spiritually as well as
intellectually anchorless I felt in the early
days of my residence in the old University
town where lay the Hanovarian centre of
learning. Gottingen was in those days full of
great men. Gauss and Eiemann and Weber
were dead, but Wohler was there, and Benfey
and Sauppe and von Jhering and Eitschl —
names that stood in the "seventies" for what

HERMANN LOTZE 29

was highest in Germany in science and
classical learning and jurisprudence and
theology. Yet the figure that stood out above
all the others was that of my old master,
Hermann Lotze. I had the privilege, boy as
1 was, of seeing him often in his study as well
as of listening in his lecture-room, and to the
end of my life I shall hold the deep impres-
sion he made on me — of a combination of
intellectual power and the highest moral
stature. It seems to me but yesterday that
he used quietly to enter the lecture-room
where we students sat expectant, and, taking
his seat, fix his eyes on space as though he
were looking into another world remote from
this one. The face was worn with thought,
and the slight and fragile figure with the great
head looked as though the mind that tenanted
it had been dedicated to thought and to
nothing else. The brow and nose were
wonderfully chiselled, the expression was a
combination of tolerance with power. The
delivery was slow and exact, but the command
of language was impressive. Our feeling
towards him as we sat and listened was one of
reverence mingled with affection.

30 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

Such was Hermann Lotze as I knew him.
I have often wondered whether Brownmg had
not visited Gottingen before he wrote his
Christmas Eve, and whether it was Lotze he
had in his mind when he describes how the
spirit took him from place to place, mitil at
last —

"Alone by the entrance-door
Of a sort of temple — perhaps a college,
Like nothing I ever saw before
At home in England to my knowledge.
The tall, old, quaint, irregular town —
It may be — though which, I can't
Affirm any.

Of the famous middle-age towns of Germany ;
Is it Halle, \Veimar, Cassel, Frankfort
Or Gottingen, I have to thank for 't ?
It may be Gottingen — most likely."

Then he describes how he enters the lecture-
room and sits down among the students, and
a professor comes in : —

" I felt at once as if there ran
A shoot of love from my heart to the man.

Who stood surveying his auditory
With a wan pure look, well-nigh celestial,
Those blue eyes had survived so much.
While under the foot they could not smutch
Lay all the fleshly and the bestial."

UNIVERSITY LIFE IN WALES 31

The figure of Socrates is typical of the soul
of the people of ancient Greece. The figures
of Kant and of Lotze are typical of much that
has been distinctive in the soul of modern
Germany, of its idealism and of its culture.
We do well to study such typical figures and
to hold them in reverence. Especially do they
represent much of what counts for the highest
in University life in all countries. And it is
in the Universities, with their power over the
mind, greater in the end than the power of any
government or of any church, that we see how
the soul of a people at its highest mirrors
itself. Your University life in this country
of Wales is but young. We do not yet
see how far it will develop. But what I
know of the spirit of your people gives
me the sense that the soil in which that
young life has taken root is fertile in a high
degree.

I will close this address with the words
in which Fichte, a hundred and five years
since, took leave of his hearers at the
University of Erlangen on an occasion like
this : —

" If a thought of mine have entered into any

32 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

now present, and shall abide there as a guide
to higher truth, perhaps it may sometimes
awaken the memory of this discourse and of
me — and only in this way do I desire to live in
your recollection ! "

THE CALLING OF THE PEEACHER

An Address delivered to the Theological Society of the
New College at Edinburgh, on ISth October 1910.

THE CALLING OF THE PREACHEE

You have invited one v^ho is a layman to
deliver a presidential address to you v^ho
are theological students. It is not without
misgiving that I have accepted your invitation
and come here to speak. And I will say at
once that it is only as a layman — a layman in
spirit as well as in name — that I am here.
I will take my chance simply as a man of
the world who has been given an opportunity
of telling what he has found helpful, and what
the reverse, in sermons to which he has
listened. I may, I think, fairly regard myself
as able to represent to you a good many of
those who will be your future hearers. I
belong to no particular caste. I have had
opportunities of observing various phases of
social life. I have been a good deal in
contact with the working classes, and I have
known something of the atmosphere breathed

§5

36 THE CALLING OF THE PREACHER

by kings and their courtiers. I have spent
part of my life at seats of learning, in this
country and abroad, and I have associated
with lawyers and men of business, with
soldiers and with statesmen. I have had,
as intimate friends, men of science, professors
of philosophy, and ministers of religion. If,
then, I am a layman in the unusual position
of speaking with theologians, I hope to try
to use the opportunity you have thought fit
to give me without falling into the narrow
groove that arises from habitual confinem.ent
to single topics.

This is all I have to say by way of apologia.
The subject which I have chosen is "The
Calling of the Preacher," and I have chosen
it because, after listening to many discourses
from pulpits, it appears to me that there are
things which one who is usually a listener may
respectfully urge on those to whom he listens.
After all, they have to stimulate and instruct
others, and there are things which ought, from
the standpoint of the listener, to be said about
how this must be done if it is to be successful.
What is it that we come for to the churches ?
Come we do, and in numbers that probably

THE SPIRITUAL NEED 37

do not really dimmish, however the outward
semblance of habit may have changed. There
is deep down in human nature an earnest
craving for spiritual stimulation and enlighten-
ment; the money and the buildings, and the
time and the organisation, which are to-day
being devoted in all countries to the satisfaction
of this craving, are the proof of its reality.

Yet there is dissatisfaction. People feel
that very often they do not get what they
have come to seek. Many sermons fall flat,
and, were it not for a vague but very evident
desire for association in some sort of spiritual
community, congregations would be smaller.
All is not right, and the question to be
answered is what it is that is wrong, and
where it is that the remedy is to be sought.

Some forty years ago, Matthew Arnold, an
Englishman more than usually well equipped
for criticism, wrote a book which seems to
me to have been misunderstood. Whatever
objection may properly be taken to the tone
of some of the passages in Literature and
Dogma, the task which the author set before
him was one which he took up in all serious-
ness. It was, in his own words, "to find, for

c 2

38 THE CALLING OF THE PREACHER

the Bible, a basis in something which can be
verified, instead of in something which has to
be assumed." He quotes Vinet with approval
as declaring that " we must make it our business
to bring forward the rational side of Christian-
ity, and to show that for thinkers, too, it has
a right to authority." Arnold's solution was
to read and learn as much as possible, "getting
the power, through reading, to estimate the
proportion and relation in what we read."
His conclusion may be illustrated by his
declaration that we should be safest with
a conception of God as "the Eternal Power,
not ourselves, by which all things fulfil the
law of their being." With this as his standard
he passed many criticisms on the ways of
saying and doing that were current in Church
circles in England in his time, criticisms many
of which have turned out to be over-anxious.
But the book was in reality a very serious
book, and, despite certain faults of taste, it
emphasised great truths. Much has happened
since Arnold wrote. The influence, which he
dreaded, of Strauss and Mr Bradlaugh has
passed away. The old form of unbelief, the
opposing of dogma to dogma, no longer con-

DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE 39

fronts us. And yet there is apparent, even
more than in the period when Arnold wrote,
the indifference which arises from want of
grasp and of faith. Men and women are
convinced of the reality of social problems in
a way they were not then, and they work at
them with the devotion which is the child of
conviction. But they are not stirred as they
were once by religious doctrine. A century
has hardly passed since it was the custom in
every sermon preached in Scotland by the
evangelical school to set forth, fully and with-
out fail, the cardinal doctrine of the Atonement.
The reason of the practice was that words
which to-day seem to many abstract, imperfect,
and remote, were to our ancestors the most
vivid means possible of imparting the sense of
reality. I am not sure that the truth which
underlay the old pictorial images was very
different from the conclusions of knowledge as
they are to-day. The forms in which the
deeper learning as to the nature of ultimate
reality are expressed, vary in different genera-
tions with the changes of the time spirit. But
the substance, the ideal, which the efforts of
each age aim at expressing, human as these

40 THE CALLING OF THE PREACHER

efforts are, this substance, this ideal, remains
permanent. What is needful is that the
language in which we endeavour to give
expression to the creeds should be of a char-
acter to awaken belief. Words which inculcate
the great moral and religious duty of man
towards his neighbour, the sacredness with
which Christianity has invested every human
personality, however lowly — words like these
are, it is true, capable of giving the same sense
of reality as did the old statements of the
doctrine of the Atonement. Yet in neither
case is the form of expression satisfactory.
We are probably at least as one-sided to-day
as our ancestors were, only the one-sidedness
is of a different kind. And if we ask why the
disposition to look away from the old doctrine,
and indeed from all abstract doctrines, is so
marked, the answer seems to be that among
the great mass of the people, not less than
among the learned, there is a general distrust
of abstract propositions. This is not a
phenomenon which is confined to theology.
It is apparent in contemporary philosophy,
and it is manifest through the range of the
sciences, from mathematics to biology. Every-

DOUBTS 41

one seems afraid of saying anything without
at once qualifying it by adding that his
assertion is provisional only, merely a partial
and fragmentary effort to express the truth,
and is to be taken as nothing else.

Now valuable as this cautious spirit is in
getting rid of superstition — philosophical and
scientific, as well as theological — it brings with
it immensely increased difficulties for the
teacher and the preacher alike. They have
not the power of moving their hearers that
their forefathers had, because they are not
themselves convinced as their forefathers
were. The modern preacher has not to face
the counter dogmas of a Bradlaugh or a
Strauss, the kind of prophet whose power
Matthew Arnold feared. He is, on the con-
trary, confronted with doubts as to the very
possibility of knowledge and the capacity of
intelligence itself Such doubts carry with
them misgiving as to religious doctrine, at all
events in so far as it pretends to scientific
accuracy. If Matthew Arnold were writing
to-day he would be troubled, not by the
progress of unbelief of the old dogmatic kind,
but by the influence of the pragmatic doubts

42 THE CALLING OF THE PREACHER

of Professor William James, that remarkable
thinker who has recently passed from among
us, and of the questionings about the validity
of intellectual processes which are associated
to-day with the famous name of M. Bergson.
It is true that Pragmatism, freshly as it was
stated by the American philosopher whom
some of us who were his friends are now
mourning, is nothing new ; it is indeed little
more than a resuscitation of a definite phase
of Greek thought. And as for the doctrine
of M. Bergson's brilliant book, L Evolution
Creatrice, if anyone will be at the j^ains to
read through the first volume of Die Welt als
Wille und Vorstellimg, he may think that,
despite the freshness and originality of the
modern statement, what is distinctive in
Bergson was in substance anticipated by
Schopenhauer three generations ago.

Yet the fact remains that, whether the
reasons for doing so are sufficient, a halt in
belief has been called, not only in Harvard
and in Paris, but all around us, and that this
feature of the present time creates fresh diffi-
culties for the preacher. It is little consolation
to him to know that he is not alone. It is

PREDOMINANCE OF THE NEGATIVE 43

true that there is as much disposition to hold
aloof from doctrines which were accepted
as finally established by mathematicians,
physicists, and physiologists a generation ago,
as there is to hold aloof from the old doctrine
of the Atonement. The theories in pure
mathematics of the arithmetic continuum as
the foundation of the calculus, in physics of
the electrical constitution of matter, in biology
of the quasi-purposive action of the parts of
a whole as the definition of life, and the
consequent rejection of the old mechanical
negation of vitalism — these when you analyse
them turn out to be intellectual efi'orts of a
negative or critical rather than of a constructive
character. In the same way much that has
recently been written about philosophy means
rather a want of faith in the sweeping results
of Idealism than the setting-up of a new
and different doctrine. Nevertheless there is
consolation for the present-day predominance
of the negative. Now, as at other periods,
that negative is showing itself to be part and
parcel of a movement towards a more complete
view. It is disclosing itself, wherever it
appears, as the commencement of a necessary

44 THE CALLING OF THE PREACHER

correction of what were abstract and narrow
points of view. This is notably so in science,
where, so far from there being any indication
of stagnation, the rate of progress is enormous.
Whether we look at mathematics, pure or
applied, or physics, or chemistry, or biology,
it is no exaggeration to say that nothing
approaching the advances in knowledge which
are taking place at this moment have ever
before been witnessed. And the potent
instrument in these advances has been the
just use of the negative, the method of
criticism and correction, and the consequent
widening of conceptions and outlook. Faith
in the fact of progress is being substituted
everywhere in the region of science for faith
in finality of result.

But if this has been so in science, why
should it not be so in philosophy and
theology ! And if the method of enlarging
the outlook can help there, can it not equally
do so in the case of the practical preacher ?
He, like the modern teacher of science, may
succeed in inspiring his hearers, not with faith
in finality of result, but with faith in continuity
of progress. If he is to do so he must resort

MIRACLES AND FAITH 45

to the same means. He must gain for himself
a wide outlook if he is to teach those who
learn from him to have one. Now this was
just what Matthew Arnold meant when he
wrote Literature and Dogma, only, because the
circumstances of the time were different, he
applied his meaning in a way that is different
from what we require to-day.

What he really meant to convey was that
we must not shut our eyes to the importance
and truth of the negative ; for example, in the
form of the criticism of the Tubingen School,
or of the broader attacks on the authenticity
of the Gospel narrative and the Biblical
cosmogony contained in such books as The
Old Faith and the New. But to this I take
him to have desired to add something, which
in these days, when much light has been
thrown by investigation on the true part
played by the negative in knowledge, would
be said more explicitly. To overthrow the
evidence on which we are asked to believe
in certain miracles is not to overthrow the
foundation of Christian faith. Christian faith
is rather the foundation of these miracles than
itself founded on them. The state of mind

46 THE CALLING OF THE PREACHER

which, denying the truth of the narrative of
the miracle, excludes also the broad principle
of the relation of man to God, of the natural to
the supernatural, as taught by Jesus, finds
itself in a position as barren as it is dogmatic.
The outcome is always a reaction from the
attitude of unbelief, but not always a return to
the old uncritical ignorance which identified
the miracle and the profound truth of which it
was symbolical. To restore a simple faith is
the object of the great teacher, but the
simplicity of that faith he seeks to restore on
the basis not of ignorance but of knowledge.
A profound conviction of the reality of what is
above nature in the presence of God in man,
and in the conceptions of God and man being
logically necessary each to the other, is at least
consistent with the form of this conviction
being wholly independent and even contra-
dictory of any mechanical manifestation of
what is divine. It is within us, as immanent,
and not without us, that modern learning
teaches us to look for a divine presence. Now
Arnold wanted to point his readers to the
higher view of the nature of truth, the view in
which the abstract affirmative with w^hich we

"THE ONLY WISDOM'^ 47

start becomes qualified by a negative which
itself is no resting-place, but merely the
stepping-stone to a larger and wider outlook
from a position which is out of the reach of
the waves of controversy. And this outlook
he thought could only be reached through
enlargement of knowledge. " Get knowledge,
get 'Geist/" he said. And to-day we need
" Geist," and we must get knowledge, though
knowledge apart from practice cannot be the
completion of wisdom. But in what form is
the man Avho is training himself to influence
the minds of those who will come to him once
a week for guidance to aim at getting this
knowledge !

There is a saying of Heraclitus of Ephesus
which is of far-reaching significance: "Much
learning does not instruct the mind, else it had
instructed Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes,
and Hecatseus. The only wisdom is to know
the reason that reigns over all." It is not, in
other words, any mere accumulation of book
learning that will enable us to rid ourselves of
the narrow and abstract conceptions that are
the source of our doubts and perplexities, of
the antinomies which rise up like spectres to

48 THE CALLING OF THE PREACHER

bar advance towards light. It is the larger
outlook which comes from mastery and com-
prehension, and which shows that it is we who
have ourselves set limits to our grasp of the
fullness of reality, limits which we transcend
even in grasping the fact of their presence.
In a sense all knowledge implies self-limitation.
In science as in everything else, it is true that
he who would accomplish anything must limit
himself. To get his mathematical structures
clearly before his mind, the mathematician
limits himself He abstracts his attention
from every phase of existence save quantities
and rates of change, and with these, quasi
pictorially indeed, but none the less ideally,
he constructs a universe which exists for him
not the less because it is only an ideal. He
shuts out from attention causes, life, beauty,
morality, religion, and much besides. Their
existence as actual and necessary phases of
the real he does not deny, he simply takes no
cognisance of them. In this way he of set
purpose affirms the negative. For he has — if
he would, with his finite faculties, get beyond
the limits of what is immediate, and construct a
universe which he can take in and grasp in its

TENDENCIES OF THE PHYSICIST 49

entirety — to restrict the number of the con-
ceptions and categories which he employs.
By so doing he exposes himself, in his efforts
to comprehend, to temptations to narrow-
mindedness. But it is easy for him to avoid
them, because it is plain that his special outlook
on his world is bound of necessity to be too
abstract to be adequate to the richness of the
varying and complex content of actual experi-
ence. The temptations of the physicist are
more subtle and dangerous, for his categories
bring him apparently more close to actual
experience, and he is more prone in conse-
quence, not merely to search out the negative,
which is the stepping-stone to greater clearness
and depth of conception, but to regard this
experience as confined to the substances and
causes for which alone his conceptions or
categories enable him to search. It is difficult
for him to realise that he has artificially pre-
cluded himself from even taking in the fact of
life, and much more from interpreting it.
He is prone to deny the reality of any whole
which is presupposed by and controls its parts
or members, as if it were a conscious purpose
to the fulfilment of which each of these parts

D

50 THE CALLING OF THE PREACHER

or members devotes itself like a good citizen
in a state. And yet such a metaphor, although
for other reasons inapplicable, is nearer to the
concrete and actual fact than his own metaphor
of a cause operating ah extra. For how other-
wise is an organism to be explained which
develops a course of existence from birth to
death, a course which is not arbitrary but
conforms to a principle, and in which the living
whole preserves the continuity of its existence,
though every particle of matter which it takes
in from the environment is changed from time
to time till not one that was originally there
remains? The analogy is certainly more
nearly that of the action of an intelligent being
than one of the physical relation of cause and
effect. Undoubtedly life is real. But the
physicist only stumbles into an abyss of bad
metaphysics when he tries to interpret and
explain it through the only categories which
for him are permissible. No more can the
biologist — who knows the conception of life
and nothing more — penetrate in his capacity as
biologist into the world of the moralist or the
artist. The history of thought is filled with
illustrations of the confusion and failure which

EXPERIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE 51

has arisen from the attempt to hypostatise the
negative in this further form by extending
biological conceptions to regions where they
do not apply. The truth is that human
experience is richer and grander than can be
realised by the exclusive votaries of any one
science. Yet their procedure, though its
characteristic is insistence on the negative, is
a genuine means of advancing knowledge.
What explains this apparent contradiction is
that their negative is a negative pregnant in
which they do not remain, but through which
they raise the original affirmative conception
to a richer and higher level.

Now I am not, in insisting on the value of
this procedure, suggesting to you that the
preacher must, in order to do his work,
possess universal knowledge. If he tried to
acquire it he would probably end in becoming
what Heraclitus hints to us that his own
predecessors were. It is not so that the
preacher can hope to come to know the
reason that reigns over all. But I do suggest
to you that a man, even of modest abilities, may
learn how to free his mind from idola which lead
him to try to shut the universe into narrow

62 THE CALLING OF THE PREACHER

and limited conceptions. He will, if he is to

enlarge his horizon, find it essential, unless he

has unusual gifts, to discipline his mind by

proper study in what I will call the dialectic,

which is not destructive but constructive.

Some there are who possess intuitively the

attitude which is for the great majority only

possible as the result of hard spiritual toil.

History records this quality even in uneducated

men. Great poets, who have not always

been educated, at times have flashed forth

that which, like lightning, for the moment

dispels the darkness. Genius does not need

actual experience to draw upon. But for the

vast majority of us the case is different. Only

adequate knowledge can deliver us from the

spectres which want of knowledge has conjured

up. Without this adequate knowledge we do

not know how to correct and deepen first

impressions, impressions which are often very

vivid. In the second part of his Ethics,^

Spinoza, a man of the finest intellectual

temper, and a model for those who would

acquire the spirit of saintly tolerance, describes

the errors into which men are prone to fall

1 Prop. X., Schol. 2.

CONTRADICTION 53

in contemplations of this kind : " Thus, while
men are contemplating finite things they think
of nothing less than the divine, and again
when they turn to consider the divine nature
they think of nothing less than of the fictions
on which they have built up the knowledge of
finite things, with the result that what they
come to about the divine nature is of no
assistance. Hence it is not wonderful that
they contradict themselves." Another and
more recent writer, Edward Caird, the late
Master of Balliol, a man who united to an
admirably trained intelligence high moral
strenuousness, describes, in connection with
this very passage, still more fully the process
of the mind in working its way towards
freedom from the perplexities that are un-
avoidable at the outset of its voyage of
discovery. I quote from his book on The
Critical Philosophy of Kant, " Contradiction
or Antimony," he says,^ "is the necessary law
of thought in itself from which it cannot in
any region escape. The first stage of intelli-
gence, the stage of common sense, is one in
which there is an undeveloped consciousness

1 Vol. ii., p. 68.

D 2

54 THE CALLING OF THE PREACHER

of the unity of thought with itself through all
the diversity of its application, and an equally
undeveloped consciousness of the discordance
and opposition of the different aspects of things
which are gathered together in knowledge.
The contradiction of objects with each other,
and with the thought that apprehends them,
is not yet perceived, and hence no reconciliation
is wanted. The identity is felt through the
diversity, the diversity through the identity,
and no more is required. At times, indeed,
one aspect of things is more prominent than
another. Eeligious emotion lifts man above
the divided and fragmentary existence in
which in his secular life he usually dwells, and
makes vividly present to him a unity which
in general is but shadowy and uncertain.
But he passes through the one state of
consciousness after the other, without bring-
ing them into contact or considering whether
they are consistent or inconsistent. For many,
indeed, there never is any conscious discord,
and there never is any effort after inward
harmony. But even where the intellectual
impulse is feeble, the moral difficulties of
life are constantly tending to awaken in us

AIMS OF THE PREACHER 55

a sense of the differences and oppositions that
exist in thought and things. And as the mind
cannot abjure its faith in itself, it is forced by
the necessity of its own development upon a
choice between different elements of its life,
which seem at first to contradict and to
exclude each other."

I have cited these two witnesses to illustrate
the attitude which it seems to me should
characterise the student of divinity who is
seeking to qualify himself to deliver those
who come to him from spectres that arise out
of ignorance. His aim must be among other
things to set men and women on the road
of deliverance from the negative, from the
intellectual temptation that arises from a
narrow outlook. As a rule they will be
individuals who are agitated in spirit too
little rather than too much.

Let us try to see what the future preacher
will have to aim at, and what the transcending
of the negative means in practice. There are
many familiar illustrations of this which show
its use as a constructive and enlarging factor
in the constitution of a greater whole than
that with which the first start was made.

56 THE CALLING OF THE PREACHER

We see this in the family circle, where
husband and wife, parent and child, each
grow in stature by the sacrifice of self, and
the desire to find and enlarge the self in
living in and for another. We see it in the
State, where the citizen gives up some of his
freedom that others may not have their
personaKties and liberties infringed by him,
and thereby secures his own protection and
freedom by obedience to laws which are the
expression of what Rousseau, imperfectly as
he conceived it, described rightly as the
"volonte generale," which is more than the
"volonte de tons." The larger entirety of
the State, like that of the family, arises
through its inclusion of the negative in the
shape of restraint on individual action. Yet
such inclusion is the result not of mere
mechanical force ah extra, but of the purposive
action of intelligence operating ah intra. We
see this clearly in the use which the true
artist makes of the power of selection and
exclusion in his construction of an aesthetic
whole. A portrait created by such an artist
is no photograph dependent on the chance
aspects which nature at the moment presents.

THE NEGATIVE PREGNANT 57

Its expression is rather one which is born
anew of the mind of the artist himself. He
rejects as well as selects. He does not
slavishly copy nature. He seeks, often un-
consciously, to realise a larger conception of
his subject, a conception which may exclude
many actual details, but which places its
highest meaning for the onlooker in the
subject of his picture. In creating a larger
whole he raises the standpoint, and he thereby
creates that which is independent of particular
time and space, and is so made true in a
deeper meaning than that of the fashion that
passes away as moment succeeds moment.

In the regions of moral and intellectual
activity alike, he who would accomplish any-
thing must limit himself. It is only by the
sacrifice of himself or his first opinions, in
other words by accepting the negative, that
he can raise his level and reach his ideal.
But the negative must be the negative
pregnant. What the preacher, for instance,
has to show is that it is not merely by
trampling on the world, but by loving it while
trampling upon it, that freedom from that
world is to be gained. And he has to show

58 THE CALLING OF THE PREACHER

in a fashion analogous that it is not by ignoring
the historical and scientific difficulties that
embarrass faith in Christianity, but by setting
these difficulties in their limited significance
and true proportion, while at the same time
frankly facing them, that deliverance from
doubt is to be got. In each case the process
is that of the effort after a larger whole which
takes into itself both what was the original
standpoint and its qualification through
criticism.

In Scotland to-day the prevailing attitude of
the working and middle classes seems to me to
be that of a mild agnosticism. Now this is
not a healthy attitude. It indicates indifference,
a disposition to give up the struggle, to jump
to premature conclusions, and to accept the
negative as an end, and not as the stepping-
stone of return to a higher and wider belief in
the affirmative. But if there is to be a spiritual
victory there must be, as its preliminary,
a spiritual struggle. Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
furnish testimony to this truth — yet testimony
which after all falls short in its convincingness
of the testimony of the Gospels themselves.

THE NECESSITY OF DYING 59

No man is a complete man unless he has
wrestled for his mental freedom. It is not
enough to exclaim, however sincerely, with
Matthew Arnold : —

" Calm Soul of all things, make it mine,
To feel, amid the city's jar,
That there abides a peace of Thine
Man did not make, and cannot mar.

" The will to neither strive nor cry.
The power to feel with others give ;
Calm, calm me more ! Nor let me die
Before I have begun to live."

The teaching of the Christian religion is
sterner than this. If man is to be reconciled
with God, he must first realise his division
from God, and have the consequent sense of
failure. He must learn that the way out is to
surrender his will and to find it again in a
simple acceptance of the highest will. He
must realise not only the meaning but the
necessity of dying in order to live. Life is
regained and peace attained when he has
successfully struggled through the valley of
the shadow of the negative, and not before.
It is only by furnishing him with the materials
necessary for criticism of his own position

60 THE CALLING OF THE PREACHER

that even the learning of Heraclitus can help
him along his difficult path. The one power
which can conduct him safely to its conclusion
is a sense of the divine within himself, a sense
which can only be awakened when he has first
become practically aware of his intellectual
and moral finiteness. These things are taught
in the New Testament with a simplicity and
directness which is hardly to be found else-
where. Yet while Christianity did far more
than any other influence to introduce these
conceptions into the world, they are not the
monopoly of the teachers who call themselves
Christian. Something of a like conquest and
corresponding humility of mind we see in that
picture of the dying Socrates which Plato
has given to us in the Phaedo. The great
modern thinkers, in poetry as well as in prose,
teach us a similar lesson, and some of them
have not been Christians. Yet in the main
the source of our inspiration to-day, the
example to which we turn, is what we find in
the Gospels. Nowhere else is the gap between
man and God so displayed in its terrors.
Nowhere else is it so completely bridged over.
Nowhere else are we taught with the same

GREATNESS OF KANT 61

vividness that God and man alike need each
other, the infinite that it may have reahty, the
finite that it may realise its foundation in
infinity.

I abstain from even trying to say how I
think you can best work these things out for
yourselves. And the reason which restrains
me is not difficult to state. No man can
accompKsh for his brother what is necessary
in these things. Each must work out his
salvation in his own way. To some the
example of a great intellectual figure, such, for
example, as that of Kant, will appeal, Kant
who laboriously thought out the limits of
possible knowledge, and, scientifically classify-
ing his perplexities, assigned them individually
to the disregard of these Umits. He was left,
as the result of a life devoted to patient
research, with a noble faith in duty, in freedom,
in God. Over his bust in the stoa at Konigs-
berg are his own well-known words about the
two facts of daily life that he reverenced most
of all :"Der bestirnte Himmel uber mir, und
das Moralische Gesetz in mir" — the starry
heavens above, and the moral law within.

Or it may be that it is in the region, not of

62 THE CALLING OF THE PREACHER

reflection, but of work, that light will be found.
Some there are who give themselves for the
sake of those about them, and to save these
disregard riches, health, life itself. They pass
through the portal of renunciation, and in the
practice of the presence of God they find them-
selves again, and gain a faith which inspires
the onlooker with the sense of a higher
reahty.

Yet underneath the varying forms in which
the individual, be he the humblest Christian
or the most highly- equipped thinker or poet,
dedicates his life to realising the infinite, the
substance of the endeavour remains the same.
With no apparently completed result will the
true worker be satisfied. Just because the
infinite realises itself in him he w^ll be con-
scious of his shortcomings, of something beyond
and not attained, in other words of his finitude.
Yet, conversely, this consciousness of his limits
will not distress him, for in being conscious of
them he has the certainty that he is transcend-
ing them : —

" Rather I prize the doubt
Low kinds exist without,
Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark.

NO GROUND FOR DESPAIR 63

" Poor vaunt of life indeed
Were man but formed to feed
On joy, to solely seek and find and feast ;
Such feasting ended, then
As sure an end to men."

What is important is never to sit still and be
satisfied. That is always an indication that
the truth is not present. It is really in the
struggle itself and in that alone that we daily
gain and keep our life and freedom.

But the sense that the end is never wholly
in our sight is no ground for despair or even
for misgiving. Finite as we are, compelled to
seek to express in pictorial images what these
images can never adequately express, there is
an aspect of the truth in attaining to which
ordinary knowledge requires the aid of what
we may call faith, or the sense of things unseen.
A great thinker declared that within the range
of the finite we can never see or experience
that the end has really been secured. But he
went on to point out that the accomplishment
of the infinite end consists merely in removing
the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccom-
plished. That illusion can never be completely
or actually realised as removed by us mortals.
The best we can accomplish is the devotion of

64 THE CALLING OF THE PREACHER

ourselves, in reflection or in practice, or in both,
to the effort to rise above it. Were we at any
moment to succeed completely we should have
seen God, and die. Yet the faith that this
illusion is but the outcome of our finite nature,
and that the finiteness of this nature is essential
to us even in as much as we belong to God,
brings with it a sense of peace that is not the
less real because it passes the limits of every-
day understanding. For it enables us to accept
our lot in life, wliatever that lot may be, and
to say with the conviction of truth attained,
"In His will is our peace."

THE DEDICATED LIFE

A Rectorial Address delivered to the Students of the
University of Udinhurgh, on 10th January 1907.

THE DEDICATED LIFE

It is yoiir custom to leave to the Rector
freedom of choice in the subject of his address.
I take this freedom to mean that he may,
within well-understood limits, turn to the
topics that interest him most and to the things
that he would fain speak of. With me it has
happened that the personal history of the
thirty-four years that have passed since I
entered this University as an undergraduate
has been the story of the growth and deepen-
ing of a conviction. It is this conviction that
I shall to-day seek to put into words. I shall
ask you to bear patiently with me while I
strive to express it.

What at present occupies my time is public
business ; and it is my daily task, in conduct-
ing that business, to remember and to remind
others that the end which the State and its

members have to strive after is the develop-
er

68 THE DEDICATED LIFE

ment of the State. No such development can
be genuine unless it stands for progress in the
realisation of some great purpose. It is a
truism, and yet a much -forgotten truism, to
say that such purposes cannot be great if they
are narrow. The ends aimed at by those
engaged in public affairs must be based on
foundations both wide and sure ; but no
foundations are wide or sure unless they are
such that all the world can be legitimately
asked to accept them as foundations. Such a
test leaves room for abundance of healthy
party difference and criticism, but it insists on
that without which there cannot be real
stability. The foundation of purpose in the
State, through all changes of party policy,
must, if the national life is to grow perma-
nently and not diminish, to prosper and not to
fade, be ethical. A nation can insist on its just
rights and on due respect from other nations,
and yet seek to understand and meet their
efforts after their own development. A certain
cosmopolitanism is of the essence of strength.
It is not brute force, but moral power, that
commands predominance in the world. This
becomes more and more plain as civilisation at

ARMAMENTS 69

large progressively emerges from barbarism,
and other nations increase in capacity to
acquire and to rule. In the result it is the
voice of the majority of the States of the earth
that must determine which of them can be
trusted to occupy the foremost places as
trustees for the rest. Armaments, of course,
tell, but even the most powerfully armed
nation cannot in these days hold its own
without a certain measure of assent from those
around. And perhaps the time is near when
armaments will count for so much less than
is the case to-day, that they will tend to
diminish, and ultimately to become extinct. I
am not so sanguine as to believe that the good
impulses of even what I firmly believe to be
the majority of men will prove the sole or
even the proximate influence in bringing this
about. The appallingly increased effective-
ness of the means of destruction, to which the
advancing science of war is yearly adding, and
the accompanying increase in the burden of
cost, are progressively cogent arguments.
The whole system tends to work its way to its
own abolition. What can most help and give
free scope to this tendency is the genuine

E 2

70 THE DEDICATED LIFE

acceptance by the nations of a common
purpose of deliverance from the burden — a
purpose which the necessities of their citizens
will surely bring, however slowly, into
operation.

It is not, therefore, merely after brute power
that a nation can in these days safely set itself
to strive. Leadership among the peoples of
the earth depends on the possession of a
deeper insight. In national as in private life
the power of domination depends on individu-
ality— the individuality that baffles description
and much more definition, because it combines
qualities that, taken in isolation, are apparently
contradictory. Among the States, as among
their private citizens, the individuality that is
most formidable is formidable because of
qualities that are not merely physical. It
commands respect and submission because it
impresses on those with whom it comes in
daily contact a sense of largeness and of moral
and intellectual power. Such qualities may,
and generally do, carry with them skill in
armaments. This, however, is a consequence,
and not a cause. It was the moral and
intellectual equipment of Greece and Rome

LEADERS AND SPECIALISTS 71

that made them world-powers. So it has
been with Japan in our own time. And
without moral and intellectual equipment of
the highest order no nation can to-day remain
a world-power. The Tm^ks, who in the
sixteenth century were perhaps the most
formidable people in Europe, are a case in
point.

But if this be so, then the first purpose of a
nation — and especially, in these days of growth
all round, of a modern nation — ought to be to
concentrate its energies on its moral and intel-
lectual development. And this means that
because, as the instruments of this develop-
ment, it requires leaders, it must apply itself
to providing the schools where alone leaders
can be adequately trained. The so-called
heaven-born leader has a genius so strong that
he will come to the front by sheer force of that
genius almost wherever his lot be cast, for he
is heaven-born in the sense that he is not like
other men. But in these days of specialised
function a nation requires many leaders of a
type less rare — subordinates who obediently
accept the higher command and carry it out,
but who still are, relatively speaking, leaders.

72 THE DEDICATED LIFE

Such men cannot, for by far the greater part,
be men of genius ; and yet the part they play
is necessary, and because it is necessary the
State must provide for their production and
their nurture. At this point the history of
the modern State shows that the University
plays an important part. The elementary
school raises our people to the level at
which they may become skilled workers.
The secondary school assists to develop a
much smaller but still large class of well-
educated citizens. But for the production
of that limited body of men and women
whose calling requires high talent, the Uni-
versity or its equivalent alone suffices. More-
over, the University does more. For it is the
almost indispensable portal to the career of
the highest and most exceptionally trained
type of citizen. Not knowledge, not high
quality, sought for the sake of some price to
be obtained for them, but knowledge and
quality for the sake of knowledge and quality
are what are essential, and what the University
must seek to produce. If Universities exist
in sufficient numbers and strive genuinely to
foster, as the outcome of their training, the

THE CAPACITY TO ORGANISE 73

moral and intellect aal virtue which is to be
its own reward, the humanity which has the
ethical significance that ought to be inseparable
from high culture, then the State need not
despair. For from among men who have
attained to this level their will, if there be a
sufficient supply of them, emerge those who
have that power of command which is born of
penetrating insight. Such a power generally
carries in its train the gift of organisation, and
organisation is one of the foundations of
national strength.

About the capacity to organise I wish to
say something before I pass on. It is a gift of
far-reaching significance. It is operative alike
in private and in public life, and it imports
two separate stages in its application. The
first is that of taking thought and fashioning a
comprehensive plan, and the second is the
putting into operation the plan so fashioned.
The success of what is done depends on the
thoroughness of the thinking that underlies it.
The thought itself is never complete apart
from its execution, for in the course of execu-
tion it is brought to the test, and may even
modify and refashion itself. The most perfect

74 THE DEDICATED LIFE

scientific treatise, the most finished work of
art, has to a great extent become what, it is
only in the actual execution. And yet the
result has in reality been but the development
of what had to be there before the start was
made. The greatest statesmen and the greatest
generals are those who have adapted their
plans to circumstances, and yet the capacity
for forming plans in advance has been of the
essence of their greatness.

Now, it often happens in organisation on a
great scale that the work of fashioning the
broad features of the plan is done by one man
or one set of men, and the work of realising
the ideas so matured by another. For any
task that is very great, and must extend over
much time, co-operation is essential. The
thinker and the man of action must work in
close conjunction, but they need not be, and
generally cannot be, the same person, nor need
they live at the same time. The history of
perhaps the most remarkable case of organisa-
tion based on culture — the case of Germany in
the nineteenth century — is highly suggestive
on this point. For the beginning of the story
we must turn back to the beginning of the

THE POWER OF MIND 75

nineteenth century. After the Battle of Jena,
Germany was under the heel of Napoleon.
From the point of view of brute force she was
crushed. In vain she shook at her chains;
the man was tY)o strong for her. But there is
a power that is greater than that of the sword
— the power of the spirit. The world was
now to witness the wonderful might of thought.
Germany was weak and poor, and she had no
Frederick the Great to rai'se her. But she
had a possession that, even from a material
standpoint, was to prove of far greater import-
ance to her in the long run. Since the best
days of ancient Greece there had been no such
galaxy of profound thinkers as those who were
to be found in Berlin, and Weimar, and Jena,
gazing on the smoking ruins which Napoleon
had left behind. Beaten soldiers and second-
rate politicians gave place to some of the
greatest philosophers and poets that the world
has seen for 2000 years. These men re-
fashioned the conception of the State, and
through their disciples there penetrated to the
pubHc the thought that the life of the State,
with its controlling power for good, was as
real and as great as the life of the individual.

76 THE DEDICATED LIFE

Men and women were taught to feel that in
the law and order which could be brought
about by the general will alone was freedom
in the deepest and truest sense to be found —
the freedom which was to be reaHsed only by
those who had accepted whole-heartedly the
largest ends in place of particular and selfish
aspirations. The State obtained through this
teaching a new significance in relation to moral
order, and this new significance began gradu-
ally to be grasped by the people. The best of
them learned a yet farther-reaching lesson,
that none but the largest outlook can suffice
for the discovery of the meaning of life or the
attainment of peace of soul. It is not in some
world apart that the infinite is to be sought,
but here and now, in the duties that lie next
to each. No longer need men sit down and
long for something afar from the scene of their
toil, something that by its very nature as
abstract and apart can never be reached. The
end is already attained in the striving to realise
it. Faust at last discovered happiness at the
very end of his career. But it was not an
external good reached that made him for
the first time exclaim to a passing moment.

THE TRUE LEADER 77

" Stay, thou art fair ! " It was the flashing on
his mind of a great truth : " That man alone
attains to life and freedom who daily has to
conquer them anew." The true leader must
teach to his countrymen the gospel of the wide
outlook. He must bid them live the larger
life, be unselfish, be helpful, be reverent. But
he must teach them yet more. He must fill
the minds of those who hear him, even of such
as are in the depths of national despair, with
the sense of the greatness of which human
nature is capable.

Such was the lesson taught to downcast
Germany at the beginning of last century. It
was taught by a succession of great men.
The world has hardly before seen a formative
influence so powerful brought to bear on the
youth of a nation. Its strength lay in the
wonderful combination, directed to a common
end, of genius of the most diverse kind. In
science, in philosophy, in theology, in poetry,
in music, the Higher Command was given and
obeyed, and the subordinate leaders, penetrated
by great ideas, set to work animated by the
same spirit. One notable result was the life
which, almost from the first, was breathed

78 THE DEDICATED LIFE

into the Universities of Germany. The new
ideas dominated them, and they were to remain
dominated by these ideas for nearly half a
century. Along with a conception of the
reality and importance of the State, which was
of almost exaggerated magnitude, there grew
up the reverent acceptance of the necessity of
thought as a preliminary to action. The result
was a tendency to organisation in every
direction, and the rule of the organising spirit.
This took hold as it had never before taken
hold of any nation. The great thinkers and
their disciples were quick to perceive that if
Germany could not as she was rival France,
with Napoleon as the leader of the French
nation, she might yet evolve in course of time
a military organisation to whose perfection
no limit could be set. Scharnhorst and
Clausewitz showed the way, and began the
work which was to be completed by Moltke
and Roon and Bismarck. But it was not to
military organisation that the German mind
turned first of all. The leaders saw clearly
that education was the key to all advance, and
they set to work to prepare for the education
of the people. The work took sixty years to

GERMAN ORGANISATION 79

complete, but completed it was at last, with a
thoroughness the like of which the world has
hardly seen elsewhere. For again the spirit of
organisation, of the systematic action which is
based on prehminary and systematic thinking,
was at work. The German scheme of educa-
tion stands out to-day as a single whole,
containing within itself its three great stages.
As a triumph of the spirit of organisation it is
unrivalled, except by that wonderful outcome
of scientific arrangement — the German Army.
And the means by which all these things were
called into existence and brought about was
chiefly the co-operation of the University with
the State in producing the men who were to
lead and to develop the organisation.

Germany is to-day immersed in practical
affairs. But she cherishes the educational and
military institutions, of which the great figures
of the early nineteenth century were the real
founders. The development of her technical
high schools and of her navy, under the
brilliant leadership of the Emperor William II.,
shows that she has not lost the faculty which
came to her through them. When the lesson
of self-organisation is once learned by a

80 THE DEDICATED LIFE

people, it is not readily forgotten. The habit
survives the effort that initiated it. But this
has another side, the drawback of which must
not be overlooked. Recent German literature
points to effects of organisation on the history
of German life other than those I have spoken
of. When a leader of genius comes forward,
the people may bow before him, and surrender
their wills, and eagerly obey. Such was the
response to the great German leaders of
thought of a century since. But men like
these dominated because they inspired, and
lifted those they inspired to a new sense of
freedom gained. To obey the commanding
voice was to rise to a further and wider
outlook, and to gain a fresh purpose. Organisa-
tion, were it in daily affairs, or in the national
life, or in the pursuit of learning, was a conse-
quence and not a cause. But this happy
state of things by degrees passed, as its
novelty and the original leaders passed away.
It revived for a time later in its national
aspect under the inspiration of the struggle for
German unity and supremacy. But, so far
as the lead in the region of pure intellect was
concerned, the great pioneers had nearly all

OFFICIALISM 81

gone by 1832, and the schools of thought
which they had founded had begun rapidly to
break up. What did remain were the
Universities, and these bore on the torch.
Yet even the Universities could not avert
a change which was gradually setting in.
After 1832 the source of the movement ceased
for the time to be personality. A great policy
had become merged in habit, and was now
the routine of the life of the State. As a
consequence, the deadening effect of official-
dom had begun to make itself felt. To-day in
Germany there are murmurs to be heard on
many sides about the extent to which the life
and freedom of the individual citizen are
hemmed in by the State supervision and
control which surround him, and which endure
almost from the cradle to the grave. The
long period of practically enforced attendance
at the secondary school for him who seeks to
make anything of life ; the terror of failure in
that leaving examination, to fail in which
threatens to end the young man's career ; the
feeling that the effect on life of compulsory
mihtary service cannot be certainly estimated ;
the State supervision and control of the citizen

F

l3o a4(i7

82 THE DEDICATED LIFE

in later days; all these are leading some
Germans to raise the question whether a great
policy has not been pushed forward beyond
the limits within which it must be kept, if
initiative and self-reliance are not to be arrested
in their growth. Where we in this country
are most formidable as competitors with the
Germans is in our dealings with the unfore-
seen situations which are always suddenly
arising in national life, political and commercial
alike. We are trained to depend, not on the
State, which gives us, perhaps, too little help,
but on ourselves. So it has been notably in
the story of our Colonial development. The
habit of self-reliance and of looking to nothing
behind for support has developed with us the
capacity of individual initiative and of rule in
unciviHsed surroundings in a way which makes
some reflecting Germans pause and ask
whether all is well with them. They point to
our great Public Schools, and compare them
with their own great secondary schools. They
are, many of them, asking to-day whether the
German gymnasium, with its faultlessly
complete system not only of teaching but of
moulding youth, really compares altogether

ENGLAND AND GERMANY 83

favourably with our unorganised Eton and
Harrow, where learning may be loose, but
where the boys rule themselves as in a small
State, and are encouraged by the teachers to
do so. Thus, declare some of the modern
German critics, are leaders of men produced
and nurtured, with the result that they rule
wherever they go, and that when they migrate
to distant lands they love their school and
their country in a way that is not possible for
the German of to-day, who has not in the same
fashion known what it is to rely on himself
alone.^

I do not desire either to extol or to detract
from the spectacle which our great commercial
and political rival on the continent of Europe
presents. She has to learn from us, as well
as we from her. I would only point to the
lesson she has taught us of the value of organ-
isation and the part the Universities have
played in it. Like all valuable principles, that
of the duty to organise may be ridden too
hard, but into this danger our national char-
acteristics are not likely to let us fall. But

1 Cf. Ludwig Gurlitt, Der Deutsche und sein Vaterland.
Berlin, 1903.

84 THE DEDICATED LIFE

let us turn from the contemplation of these
ideals to the actualities of our Scottish
University life, and glance at the possibilities
which that life affords. You are, most of you,
the sons and daughters of parents whose care
has been that you should have the higher
education. Riches were not theirs. Perhaps
a struggle has been necessary in order to give
you your chance. Some of the best of you
strive hard to lighten the burden and to make
yourselves self-supporting. Bursaries and
scholarships and employment in private teach-
ing are the aids to which many of you look.
Most of you have to content yourselves with
necessaries and cannot ask for luxuries, nor do
the most eminent among you seek these.
Learning is a jealous mistress. The life of
the scholar makes more demand for concentra-
tion than any other life. He who would
really live in the spirit of the classics must toil
hard to attain that sense of easy mastery of
their language which is vital to his endeavour.
The mathematician and the physicist who
seek to wield the potent instruments of the
higher analysis, must labour long and
devotedly. To contribute to the sum total of

PASSION FOR EXCELLENCE 85

science by original research demands not only
many hom^s of the day spent in the laboratory,
but, as a rule, vast reading in addition, and
that in several languages. The student of
philosophy must live for and think of little
else before he can get rid of the habit of
unconsciously applying in his inquiries cate-
gories which are inapplicable to their subject
matter. For he has to learn that it is not
only in practical life that the abstract and
narrow mind is a hindrance to progress, and
an obstacle in the way to reality.

And as it is with the finished scholar so it
is even with the beginner. He is subject to
the same temptations, is apt to be deflected by
the same tendencies. Nothing but the passion
for excellence, the domination of a single
purpose which admits of no foreign intrusion,
can suffice for him who would reach the
heights. As the older man moulds his life in
order that he may pursue his way apart from
the distractions of the commonplace, so it is
with the best students in the University.
They live for their work, and as far as can be,
for that alone. They choose their companions
with a view to the stimulus of contact with

F 2

86 THE DEDICATED LIFE

a sympathetic mind. Social intercourse is a
means to an end, and that end is the pm^suit
of the object for which the best kind of
student has come to the University. His aim
is to grow in mental stature and to enlarge his
outlook. This he seeks after quite simply and
without affectation, and the reason is that
what he aims at is an end in itself, which he
follows reverently and with single-minded
devotion. I am speaking of men such as I
used to observe daily in this University thirty
years ago, and I doubt not — nay, I know —
that the breed is not extinct, and that my
native Scotland sends to-day to the portals of
the old walls just such material as she did a
generation since.

In no other way of life, not even in those
which witness the busy chase after wealth and
political power, is such concentration to be
found as is required in the way of life of the
genuine student. Whether he be professor or
undergraduate, the same thing is demanded of
him. He must train himself away from the
idea of spending much time on amusement
unconnected with his work. His field of
study may be wide ; he may find rest in the

OBEDIENCE— DISCIPLINE 87

very variety of what he is constantly exploring.
But the level of effort must ever be high if he
is to make the most of the short span of exist-
ence. Art is long, and Life is short. The
night in which no man can work comes
quickly enough to us all. The other day I
read some reports which had been procured
for me of the fashion in which the Japanese
Government had provided for the training of
the officers who led their countrymen to victory
on the plains and in the passes of Manchuria.
There were recorded in these dry official
reports things that impressed me much. In
the first place, the Japanese explicitly base
the whole of the training which they give to
their officers on a very high code of ethics and
of chivalry. To learn to obey is a duty as
important as to learn to command. The
future officer is taken while he is still young,
and in his cadet corps the boy who is a born
leader is systematically taught to submit to
the command of him who may be feeble and
even incompetent, but whom he is forbidden
to despise. What is aimed at is to produce
the sense that it is the corps as a whole for
which the individual must live, and, if neces-

88 THE DEDICATED LIFE

sary, die, and that against this corps no
individual claim ought to be asserted. Self-
effacement, the obligation of truthfulness,
devotion to the service of his nation, these are
the ethical lessons in vrhich the young Japan-
ese officer is instructed with a thoroughness
and a courage which, so far as I know, has no
parallel in our time. He must rise early,
abstain from luxuries, cultivate the habit of
being always busy. Amusements, as such,
seem to be unknown in the Japanese officers'
school. Eecreation takes the shape either of
exercises of a kind which are useful for
military purposes, or of change of studies.
Whether any nation can continuously produce
generation after generation of officers trained
up to this high level, I know not. What is
certain is that such training has been practised
in Japan during this generation. The result
is to be found in the descriptions of those who
were witnesses of the fashion in which the
trenches of the Eussians were stormed at
Liaoyang and Mukden. I do not quote this
case because it illustrates some extreme of the
capacity of human nature. On the contrary,
this kind of concentration has at all periods

IDEALISM 89

of the world's intellectual history been
demanded of and freely given by the scholar.
We learn from his example that when once
the highest motives become operative they
prove the most powerful of all. Just as men
will die for their religion, so history proves
that they will gladly lay their entire lives
without reserve on the altar of learning. One
sees this much more frequently than is cur-
rently realised in the Universities themselves.
Youth is the time of idealism, and idealism is
the most potent of motives. The student who
is conscious that his opportunity has been
purchased for him, not merely by his own
sacrifices, but by sacrifices on the part of those
who are nearest and dearest, has a strong
stimulus to that idealism. That is one of the
sources of strength in our Scottish Univer-
sities, the Universities of which Edinburgh
presents a noble type. I have myself wit-
nessed, in days gone by, individual concentra-
tion more intense than even that of the
Japanese officer, because it was purely
voluntary concentration, and not of action
merely, but of spirit. I have known among
my personal friends in this University such

90 THE DEDICATED LIFE

dedication of life as rivalled the best recorded
in the biographies. When the passion for
excellence is once in full swing, it knows no
limits. It dominates as no baser passion can,
for it is the outcome of the faith that can
move mountains.

To my mind, the first problem in the
organisation of a University ought to be how
to encourage this kind of spirit. Noble
characters are not numerous, but they are
more numerous than we are generally aware.
In every walk of life we may observe them if
we have eyes to see. Such nobility is the
monopoly neither of peer nor of peasant. It
belongs to human nature as such, and to that
side of it which is divine. We may seek for
it in the University as hopefully as we may
seek for it elsewhere. When once found and
recognised, it is potent by its example. Hero-
worship is a cult for which the average Scottish
student has large capacity. And so it comes
that it is not merely lecture-rooms and labora-
tories and libraries that are important. The
places where those who are busy in the pursuit
of different kinds of learning meet and observe
each other are hardly less so. The union, the

SPIRIT OF THE UNIVERSITY 91

debating society, the talk with the fellow-
pilgrim on the steep and narrow way, the
friendship of those who are struggling to
maintain a high level — these things all of
them go to the making of the scholar; and
we in the North may congratulate ourselves
that they are in reality as open to us as is
the case in the Universities of England and of
the Continent. If the corporate spirit of the
University life is not with us made manifest
by as notable signs, it is not the less there.
Ideas have been as freely interchanged, and
ties between scholars as readily created, with
us as in other Universities. The spirit needs
but little surrounding for its development, and
that little it finds as readily in the solitude of
the Braid Hills as on the banks of the Isis or
the Cam, in the walks round Arthur's Seat as
in the gardens of Magdalen or of Trinity. It
rests with those immediately concerned whether
their intellectual and social surroundings shall
suffice them or not. Certainly in the Scottish
University of to-day there is no lack of either
opportunity or provision for the formation of
the tastes of the scholar and the habits of the
worker. A man may go from these surround-

92 THE DEDICATED LIFE

ings to devote his life yet more completely to
literature, or science, or philosophy, or he may
go to seek distinction in a profession or success
in commerce. Lucretius has described him
who chooses the latter, and prefers the current
of the world's rivalry to the scholar's life, in
words which still seem to ring in my ears as
I recall the figure of a great scholar — William
Young Sellar — declaiming them to me and
others, his reverent disciples, from the Chair
of Humanity in this University many years
since, in days when we were still full of youth,
and were borne along on the flood tide of
ideahsm. The Eoman poet declares that the
lot of the man of affairs must be :

"Errare atque viam palantis quaerere vitae,
Certare ingenio, contendere nobilitate,
Noctes atque dies niti praestante labore,
Ad summas emergere opes revumque potiri."

Still, it is not the spirit of haughty contempt
which moved Lucretius to these burning and
stinging words that should be ours. It is not
enough to declare with him that the scholar
finds nothing so sweet as to look down on
those engaged in the battle of life, himself
securely entrenched within the serene temple

INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY 93

of wisdom, and to watch them struggling.
Eather does the University exist to furnish
forth a spirit and a learning more noble — the
spirit and the learning that are available for
the service of the State and the salvation of
humanity. The highest is also the most real ;
and it is at once the caUing and the privilege
of the teacher to convince mankind in every
walk of life that in seeking the highest of its
kind, they are seeking what is also the most
real of that kind. Whatever occupation in
life the student chooses, be it that of the study
or that of the market-place, he is the better
the greater has been his contact with the true
spirit of the University. At the very least he
will have gained much if he has learned- — as
he can learn from the scholar alone — the
intellectual humility that is born of the know-
ledge that teaches us our own limits and the
infinity that lies beyond. He will be the
better man should he perchance have caught
the significance of the words with which Plato
makes Socrates conclude a famous dialogue :
''If, Thesetetus, you have a wish to have any
more embryo thoughts, they will be all the
better for the present investigation; and if

94 THE DEDICATED LIFE

you have none, you will be soberer and
humbler and gentler to other men, not fancy-
ing that you know what you do not know."
For the ends of practice as for those of theo-
retical study, for skill in the higgling of the
market, for the control of great business
organisations, for that swift and almost in-
stinctive grasp of the true point which is of
the essence of success at the Bar — for these
and countless other situations in everyday
life the precept of Socrates is of a value
which it is difficult to overrate. It is the
want of insight of the narrow mind that is the
most common reason why apparently well-laid
plans get wrecked. The University training
cannot by itself supply capacity; but it can
stimulate and fashion talent, and, above all,
it can redeem from the danger of contracted
views. Thus the University becomes a potent
instrument for good to a community, the
strength of which is measured by the capacity
of the individuals who compose it. The
University is the handmaid of the State, of
which it is the microcosm — a community in
which also there are rulers and ruled, and in
which the corporate life is a moulding influence.

EQUIPMENT 95

And so we arrive at the truth, which is becoming
yearly more and more clearly perceived, not
here alone, but in other lands, that the State
must see to the well-being and equipment of
its Universities if it is to be furnished with the
best quality in its citizens and in its servants.
The veriest materialist cannot but be impressed
when he looks around and sees the increasing
part which science plays year by year in the
struggle of the nations for supremacy. It is
true that mere knowledge is not action; but
it must not be forgotten that the transition
to successful action is nowadays from know-
ledge, and not from ignorance. Things are in
our time too difficult and complicated to be
practicable without the best equipment, and
this is as much true of public affairs as it is
the case in private life.

And now let us pass to yet deeper-going
conclusions. If it be the ideal work of the
Universities to produce men of the widest
minds — men who are fit to lead as well as
merely to organise — what must such men set
before themselves ? The actual is not merely
infinite any more than it is merely finite.
The merely infinite were perfect, but the eye

96 THE DEDICATED LIFE

of man could not behold it. Only in the daily
striving to reach them, imperfect as that
striving may seem, are life and freedom
accomplished facts. The particular and the
universal are not separate existences. Each
is real only through the other. It is not in
Nature, but as immanent in the self, finite
as consciousness discloses that self to be, that
we find God ; and so it is that this great truth
pervades every relation of life. "He who
would accomplish anything must limit himself"
The man who would lead others must himself
be capable of renouncing. Not in some world
apart, but here and now, in the duty, however
humble, that lies nearest us, is the realisation
of the higher self — the self that tends God-
ward — to be sought. And this carries with
it something more. To succeed is to throw
one's whole strength into work; and if the
work must always and everywhere involve
the passage through the portal of renunciation,
be special and even contracted, then the only
life that for us human beings can be perfect
is the life that is dedicated. I mean by the
expression a "dedicated life" one that is with
all its strength concentrated on a high purpose.

SINGLENESS OF PURPOSE 97

Such a life may not seem to him who looks on
only from outside to comprise every good.
The purpose, though high, may be restricted.
The end may never be attained. Yet the
man is great, for the quality of his striving
is great. *' Lofty designs must close in like
effects."

The first duty of life is to seek to com-
prehend clearly what our strength will let us
accomplish, and then to do it with all our
might. This may not, regarded from outside,
appear to the spectator to be the greatest of
possible careers, but the ideal career is the
one in which we can be greatest according to
the limits of our capacity. A life into which
our whole strength is thrown, in which we
look neither to the right nor to the left, if to
do so is to lose sight of duty — such a life is
a dedicated life. The forms may be manifold.
The lives of all great men have been dedicated ;
singleness of purpose has dominated them
throughout.

Thus it was with the life of a Socrates,
a Spinoza, or a Newton ; thus with the
lives of men of action such as Csesar and
Cromwell and Napoleon. We may well see

98 THE DEDICATED LIFE

their limits; theirs was the sphere of what
is human, the finite. But they concentrated
on the accomplishment of a clearly conceived
purpose, and worked with their whole strength,
and the greatest of them threw that strength
into the striving after what was noblest.
They may have perished before their end
appeared accomplished in time, and yet they
have succeeded. The quality of their work
lay in the very striving itself. The end, a
profound modern thinker tells us in a great
passage, does not wait to be accomplished ;
it is always accomplishing itself. "In our
finite human life we never realise or see that
the end has in truth been reached. The
completion of the infinite purpose is thus
only the process of removing the illusion that
it is not accomplished. The good, the
absolutely good, is eternally working itself
out in the world, and the result is that it is
already there in its perfection, and does not
need to wait for us."

The noblest of souls can find full satisfaction
for his best aspirations in the sustained effort
to do his duty in the work that lies at hand to
the utmost that is in him. It is the function

PLACE OF THE UNIVERSITY 99

of education in the highest sense to teach him
that there are latent in him possibilities
beyond what he has dreamed of, and to
develop in him capacities of which, without
contact with the highest learning, he had
never become aware. And so the University
becomes, at its best, the place where the
higher ends of life are made possible of
attainment, where the finite and the infinite
are found to come together. The wider our
outlook, the more we have assimilated the
spirit of the teachers of other nations and
other ages than our own, the more will the
possibilities of action open to us, and the
more real may become the choice of that
high aim of man, the dedicated life. We
learn so to avoid the unconscious devotion
of our energies to that for which we are not
fit, and the peril of faUing unconsciously into
insincerity and unreality of purpose. We
learn so to choose the work that is most
congenial to us, because we find in it Avhat
makes us most keenly conscious that we are
bringing into actual existence the best that
lies latent in us. The wider outlook, the
deeper sympathy, the keener insight, which

100 THE DEDICATED LIFE

this kind of culture gives, do not paralyse.
They save him who has won them from
numberless pitfalls. They may teach him his
own limits, and the more he has learned his
lesson the more he will realise these limits.
But they do not dishearten him, for he has
become familiar with the truth that the very
essence of consciousness and of life is to be
aware of limits and to strive to overcome
them. He knows that without limits there
can be no life, and that to have comprehended
these limits is to have transcended them. As
for what lies beyond him he has realised that
it is but as the height in front, which is gained
only to disclose another height beyond. He
is content with his lot if, and so far as he feels
that in him too, as he seeks with all his
strength to bring forth the best that is in him,
and at the same time to be helpful to others,
God is reahsing Himself.

Such, to my mind, is the lesson which it
were the noblest function of the ideal University
to set forth, and in this fashion can such a
University help to give to the world leaders
of men, in thought and in action alike. The
spirit which it inspires brings with it the calm

REALITY 101

outlook which does not paralyse human
energy, because it teaches that it is quality
and not quantity that counts, and that the
eternal lies not far away in some other world,
but is present here and now. For the man
who has learned in this school the common
picture of the future life becomes an image
that has been raised to correct the supposed
inadequate and contingent character of this
one ; and, as his insight into the deeper
meaning of reality in this world grows, so he
realises that his true immortality begins on
this side of the grave. To feel himself infinite
in his finitude, to learn to accept his closely-
bounded life and task as the process in which
the side of him that is touched by infinity
becomes real, to be aware of the immanence
of the Divine in the humblest and saddest
consciousness — this is the lesson which each
of us may learn, the secret which the teaching
of a true University may unlock for us ; the
teaching of a University, but not in the
commonplace and restricted sense. In such
a school we are instructed in the theoretical
meaning of life as we can hardly be elsewhere.
But this is not the only discipline by which

G 2

102 THE DEDICATED LIFE

we obtain deliverance from the burden of our
ignorance, and are led to dedicate ourselves
to noble ends. There is a lesson which ought
never to be overlooked, and that is the
necessity of suppressing the will to live.
Before we can command we must learn to
obey, and this also a true University life has
to teach.

There is innate in the great mass of men
and women instinct of obedience to the
nature that is higher than their own. In the
days in which we live mere rank does not
awaken this instinct ; in the Anglo-Saxon race
the belief in the Divine right of kings has
passed away. But even in this forgotten faith
we have the spectacle of something that was
symbolical of a deeper truth.

Belief in God and submission to His
will is the foundation of religion. Belief in
the State as real equally with the indi-
vidual citizens in whom it is realised and
whom it controls, this is the foundation of
orderly government. It is not a king as
individual, it is a king as the symbol of
what is highest in national life that to-day
commands loyalty. The instinct of obedience

TRUTH WILL PREVAIL 103

shows itselfs here, but its real foundation
resembles the foundation of that other
obedience which is made manifest in the
religious life. It is the tendency to bow
before the truth, to recognise the rational as
the real and the real as the rational. In the
main, what is highest will assert its authority
with the majority of mankind, and assert it in
the end successfully.

What is necessary, and what alone is
necessary, is that what is highest should be
made manifest, and that for this pur-
pose the mists of ignorance should be dis-
pelled. The more the leader embodies the
quality that is great, the wider and more
complete will be his ultimate sway. Time
may be required, the time that gives birth to
opportunity, but the truth will prevail.
History, and the history of religion in par-
ticular, furnishes us with an unbroken succes-
sion of witnesses to this conclusion. A leader
may apparently fail, his doctrine may be super-
seded. But if in his period he has represented
the best teaching which the Time Spirit could
bring forth, his appeal has never been in vain.
His victory may not have been complete until

104 THE DEDICATED LIFE

after his death. He himself may have been
narrow and even fanatical. He may have
given utterance to what seems to us, looking
back with a larger outlook, to have been but a
partial and inadequate expression of the truth.
But the history of knowledge is no record of
system cast aside and obliterated by what has
succeeded it. Kather is the truth a process of
development in which each partial view is
gradually corrected by and finally absorbed
into what comes after it. There may be, as
elements in the process, violent revulsions —
revulsions to what proves itself in the end to
be as one-sided as that which it has super-
seded. But, taken over a sufficient tract of
time, the process of knowledge in the main
displays itself as one in which the truth has
turned out to be a larger and deeper compre-
hension of what for the generation before was
the best of which that generation was capable.
Thus there is at all times a tendency for a
new phase of authority to display itself — the
authority which rests either on reason or on
the instinct that the highest is to be sought
beyond what belongs merely to the moment.
And the striving in which this tendency in the

AWAKENING 105

end takes shape appears in just a deeper
meaning conferred on what is here and now.
Sometimes even to a nation the revelation
comes suddenly. It wakens from its dog-
matic slumber, is wakened perhaps by the
sense of impending calamity, and proves at a
bound what is the measure of its latent
capacity.

So it was with England under Cromwell,
with France under Napoleon, with the United
States under Washington, with Germany
under the great leaders of the intellectual
awakening of the nineteenth century. So it
has been with Japan, the spectacle of whose
new and rapid development has just been
unrolled before the eyes of this generation.
The awakening has come suddenly in such
cases, and that awakening of thought and
action has been in response to the Higher
Command :

"There are flashes struck from midnights,
There are fire-flames noondays kindle.
Whereby piled-up honours perish,
Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle.
While just this or that poor impulse
Which for once had played unstifled.
Seems the sole work of a lifetime.
That away the rest have trifled."

106 THE DEDICATED LIFE

In peace as in war, history displays the
irresistible nature of this Higher Command
where it really has made itself manifest. He
who wields it may be humble. If the divine
fire of genius has inspired him, no barrier can
hold him from the highest recognition — that
recognition which is founded on the popular
conviction that, at last, in this particular
sphere of thought or of action, the truth has
been made evident.

Sometimes — perhaps more often than not
— this Command is wielded, too, by no single
man. It may take the form of a great doctrine
— the foundation of a penetrating faith, incul-
cated and enforced by a group of leaders in
co-operation, no one of whom would have
been great enough to be the head of a nation.
This was so with Germany at the commence-
ment of the last century, and it would seem to
have been so in the recent instance of Japan.
The lesson is that, given an inspiring faith,
moral or intellectual, and a sufficiency of men
imbued with it and fit to teach and to preach
it, no nation need languish for want of a single
great leader. The Higher Command is there
all the same; it is only differently expressed

FREEDOM FOR GROWTH 107

and made manifest. Here, then, it has for
long seemed to me, lies the true and twofold
function of the University. It is a place
of research, where the new and necessary
knowledge is to be developed. It is a place
of training, where the exponents of that
knowledge — the men who are to seek
authority based on it — are to be nurtured and
receive their spiritual baptism.

Such a University cannot be dependent in
its spirit. It cannot live and thrive under the
domination either of the Government or the
Church. Freedom and development are the
breath of its nostrils, and it can recognise no
authority except that which rests on the right
of the Truth to command obedience. Keligion,
art, science — these are, for the body of teachers
of the true University type, but special and
therefore restricted avenues towards that
Truth — many-sided as it is, and never
standing still. It was Lessing who declared
that were God to offer him the Truth in one
hand and the Search for Truth in the other, he
would choose the Search. He meant that,
just as the Truth never stands still, but is in
its nature a process of evolution, so the mind

108 THE DEDICATED LIFE

of the seeker after it can never stand still.
Only in the process of daily conquering them
anew do we, in this region also, gain life and
freedom. And it is in the devotion to this
search after the Most High — a search which
may assume an infinity of varied forms — that
the dedicated life consists ; the life dedicated
to the noblest of quests, and not to be judged
by apparent failure to reach some fixed and
rigid goal, but rather by the quality of its
striving.

I know no career more noble than that of a
life so consecrated. We have each of us to
ask ourselves at the outset a great question.
We have to ascertain of what we are really
capable. For if we essay what it is not given
to us to excel in, the quality of our striving
will be deficient. But, given the capacity to
recognise and seek after what is really the
highest in a particular department of life, then
it is not the attainment of some external goal
— itself of limited and transient importance —
but in earnestness and concentration of effort
to accomplish what all recognise to be a noble
purpose, that the measure of success lies. So
it was with Browning's Grammarian, Men

AIM AT PERFECTION 109

laughed at him while he lived. That did
not matter. In the end they bowed their
heads before him, and when his life was
finished laid him to rest in the highest place
they knew. For they saw the greatness of
spirit of the man who chose what he could
best accomplish, limited himself to that, and
strove to perfect his work with all his
might.

If its Universities produce this spirit in its
young men and women, a nation need not
despair. The way is steep and hard to tread
for those who enter on it. They must lay
aside much of what is present and commonly
sought after. They must regard themselves as
deliberately accepting the duty of preferring
the higher to the lower at every turn of daily
existence. So only can they make themselves
accepted leaders ; so only can they aspire to
form a part of that priesthood of humanity
to whose commands the world will yield
obedience.

There is a saying of Jesus with which I will
conclude this address, because it seems to me
to be, in its deepest interpretation, of profound
significance for us, whose concern is for the

110 THE DEDICATED LIFE

spirit of this University and for its future
influence : " Not every one that saith unto me,
Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of
heaven; but he that doeth the will of My
Father which is in heaven."

Printed by Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh.

GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

A STUDY IN NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS
An Address delivered at Oxford on 3rd August 1911.

GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

A STUDY IN NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS

It was not without hesitation that I accepted
the invitation to speak to you on this occasion.
It is never easy to make a satisfactory appre-
ciation of a country to which one stands in the
relation of a foreigner. Those who try are
sure to misjudge much and to miss more.
Germany, moreover, is for us Britons, owing
to reasons which I shall try to explain, a
specially difficult country to understand. Its
people possess traits so like those of our own,
that we are apt to overlook those other traits
in which they are profoundly unlike. Hence
arise misinterpretations and disappointments
on both sides of the German Ocean.

Nevertheless a period in history has arrived
when it becomes the duty of pubHc men in
each country to endeavour to follow and

113 pj

114 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

fathom the currents of public life and opinion
in the other. To this end the study of
national spirit is essential. How often have I
seen in the newspapers of both Germany and
England articles which missed the point and
attributed unreal motives, simply because the
writers were wanting in knowledge ! And
what is true of journalists may be true even of
statesmen.

In Oxford people at times dare to use
language which they would not venture on in
Parliament. Moreover, some of you who are
listening are Germans and professors besides.
I will therefore take my life in my hand, and
suggest to you a racial difference in habit of
mind, to be stated thus : — The EngHshman
acts der Vorstellung nach; the German dem
Begriffe nach. The Englishman has, less often
than the German, formed in his mind an
abstract principle or plan before he moves.
This is so partly by habit and partly by choice.
It is the outcome of his characteristic individu-
alism, and experience has taught him that it
often proves a source of strength. But it not
infrequently proves a source of weakness. He
constantly finds the path he has entered on

DIFFERENCES IN HABIT OF MLND 115

blocked by obstacles which he might have
foreseen. Ei^st wdgen dann wagen is a maxim
too valuable in practice to be safely neglected.
It may sometimes paralyse action in this
world of the contingent and unforeseen. But
those who practise it know where they stand,
if they do not always know where to move.

Of course people who by habit of mind act
in these diiBferent fashions are sure to misunder-
stand each other. The effort that is requisite^
even when they most wish to put themselves
at the other point of view, is for the great
majority too severe to be long sustained. The
divergence in mental temperament is em-
barrassing in itself. And it is made yet more
embarrassing by another fact. We in this
country, and I am not sure that the same is
not true of our German cousins, are a little
unimaginative about our neighbours. Our
paedagogischer Zug is sometimes provoking.
The lesson which Matthew Arnold sought to
teach his fellow citizens here when he published
Friendships Garland forty years ago has not
yet been widely learned. We used to have
friction on this account with the French, and,
but for circumstances, we might have it still.

116 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

We do sometimes have it with the Germans,
because the circumstances happen to be not
quite so favourable. It is therefore all the
more desirable that we should take pains to
get insight into the habits of thought of a
great and practical nation with which we are
being brought into an ever-increasing contact,
and in what I have to say to you to-night I
will try to contribute something, however
small, to the too contracted fund of the
necessary knowledge. I propose to devote
the bulk of this paper to an attempt to trace
the growth and meaning of what seems to me
to be the German habit of mind, and to a
description of the reasons why the outlook of
Germany is what it is to-day. The narrative
is not only a deeply interesting one, but is a
record which confers a title to high distinction
in the world's history, even for a nation so
great in other respects. It is, moreover, a
narrative not the less striking, because the
changes it records all took place within a
comparatively short period.

The practical life of the Germany of to-day
rests, far more than does that of Great Britain,
on abstract and theoretical foundations. To

THE REFORMATION 117

understand it we must examine its intellectual
development, and, for the history of the intel-
lectual development of German life, the
Reformation is a cardinal fact. Luther led
the uprising of the spirit of liberty of con-
science against the then abstract and hardly
human domination of the Church. He accom-
plished, for a large part of what is to-day
Germany, the triumph of the individual over
an organisation which had for the time being
outgrown its mission and deteriorated into
what was mechanical. But the price of
Luther's victory had to be paid. You cannot
set thought free for certain purposes only.
The light of inquiry presently began to be
turned in upon the foundations of Luther's
own faith. That faith rested on grounds of
a subjective character, and its authority was
based on feeling. Now the history of the
intellectual development of the world shows
that it has never been safe to endeavour to
divorce feeling from knowledge. The effort
is constantly being renewed, and to-day even
M. Bergson, the latest and most brilliant
exponent of the attempt to assign a secondary
place to knowledge, and to bring back the real

H 2

118 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

to the felt, seems to me to invite the inquirer
to travel along a dubious path. To try to
accomplish what he, by the way, is careful
not to attempt, the discovery of a safe and
permanent foundation for faith in what is
wholly divorced from reason, is, from a
scientific point of view, to court speedy failure.
This opinion has always been strongly held in
Germany, and it was slowly but surely brought
to bear on the Protestantism. of Luther. That
Protestantism gradually acquired, in the minds
of educated men, a negative character. It was
recognised as a legitimate and necessary
protest against the doctrine of the absolute
authority of a Church. But it was also pro-
nounced to be the beginning only and not the
end of wisdom. The history of Protestantism,
and of the sects into which it has broken itself
up, show that it is not enough to reject the
doctrine of external authority, but that the
authority of a general system based on know-
ledge, however difiicult it may be to find such
a system, has to be sought for. When the
elector managed, in 1529, to bring together
in the conference at Marburg Luther and
Zwingli, believing that the German and Swiss

THE FIRST REACTION 119

parties in the Eeformation movement would
unite their forces, he proved to be wrong.
They got very near each other in the course of
the conference, so far as good feehng went,
and sufficiently near in words. But there was
no real common basis. The historian tells us
how, at the end, Luther drew back, and
refused to shake hands with the Swiss leader
— "Ye are," he said, "of a different spirit
from us."

It was therefore natural that, with a
reflective people Hke the Germans, a definite
movement should follow that of the Eeforma-
tion, a movement directed to the discovery of
a stable basis on Avhich religion might rest, a
basis which should afford room for science and
religion alike. The sense of this necessity
became, on its subjective side, apparent in
such writings as Lessing's Nathan the
Wise. On the side of abstract knowledge we
see it begin in the metaphysics of the pre-
Kantian period, of the period of such writers
as Wolf, and in the theological Eationalism,
which was its counterpart, of such books as
the Wolfenhiittel Fragments. But the mere
reaction from the subjective, on which alone

120 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

Luther had endeavom^ed to base the claim to
authority of the Bible, went too far to be
endming. The eighteenth century was a dry
period for Germany until a second great move-
ment arose. One of the acutest of modern
critics, a critic whose capricious humour
obscured his serious side, has traced the
relation of the Reformation to this movement.
Heine, who knew more about great things
than people give him credit for, sums up the
progress in this period. Of Luther he tells us
that through him Germany gained freedom of
thought. But he adds that Luther gave
Germany not only freedom of thought, but
also the means of movement. To the spirit
he gave a body, to the thought he gave words ;
he created the German language by his transla-
tion of the Bible. And even more remarkable,
' he says, were Luther's songs. Sometimes they
resemble a flower that grows on a rocky crag,
or again a ray of moonlight trembling over
a restless sea. And sometimes he sings to
stimulate the courage of his followers, and
inflame himself to the fierce rage of battle.
He refers, no doubt, to the well-known " Ein'
feste Burg ist unser Gott," when he says that

HEINE ON LUTHER 121

a true battle song was the martial strain with
which Luther and his followers marched into
"Worms. The old cathedral trembled at those
unwonted tones, and the ravens, in their dark
nests in the steeple, started with affright. That
song, the Marseillaise of the Eeformation,
preserves to this day its inspiriting power.
But, as Heine tells us, the spirit that Luther
unchained could not have limits set to its
power. Eeason is now man's sole lamp, and
conscience his only staff in the dark mazes of
life. Man now stands alone, face to face with
his Creator, and chants his songs to Him.
Hence this literary epoch opens with hymns.
And even later, when it becomes secular, the
most intimate self-consciousness, the feeling of
personality, rules throughout. Poetry is no
longer objective, epic, and naive, but subjective,
lyric, and reflective. At this stage Heine
brings a new figure on to the scene. Since
Luther, he thinks, Germany has produced no
greater and better man than Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing. *^ These two are our pride and our
joy. In the troubles of the present we look
back at their consoling figm^es, and they
answer with a look full of bright promise.

122 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

The third man will come also, will perfect
what Luther began and what Lessing carried
on — the third Liberator." Like Luther,
Lessing's achievements consisted not only in
effecting something definite, but in agitating
the German people to its depths, and in
awakening through his criticism and polemics
a wholesome intellectual activity. He was the
vivifying critic of his time, and his whole life
was a polemic. His insight made itself felt
throughout the widest range of thought and
feeling — in religion, in science, and in art.
Lessing, declares Heine, continued the work
of Luther. After Luther had freed Germany
from the yoke of tradition and had exalted the
Bible as the only wellspring of Christianity,
there ensued a rigid word service, and the
letter of the Bible ruled just as tyrannically
as once did tradition. Lessing contributed the
most to the emancipation from the tyranny of
the letter. His tribune was art, for when he
was excluded from the pulpit or the chair he
sprang on to the stage, speaking out more
boldly, and gaining a more numerous audience.
In the year of his death, 1781, there
appeared a book from the pen of a still more

HEINE ON KANT 123

profound revolutionary. In that year Kant
published at Konigsberg the Critique of Pure
Reason, Heine likens the intellectual revolu-
tion which this book produced to the material
revolution in France, and he compares, in
his own fashion, Kant to Eobespierre. "On
both sides of the Rhine we behold the same
rupture with the past ; it is loudly proclaimed
that all reverence for tradition is at an end.
As in France no privilege, so in Germany
no thought is tolerated without proving its
right to exist; nothing is taken for granted.
And as in France fell the Monarchy, the
keystone of the old social system, so in
Germany fell theism, the keystone of the
intellectual micien regime. It is said that
the spirits of darkness tremble with afiright
when they behold the sword of an
executioner. How, then, must they stand
aghast when confronted with Kant's Critique
of Pure Reason/ The book is the sword
with which in Germany theism was decapi-
tated. To be candid, you French are tame
and moderate compared with us Germans.
At most you have slain a king, and he had
already lost his head before he was beheaded."

124 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

Then Heine draws a picture of Kant, with
his bourgeois and methodical habits, and
speaks of the strange contrast between the
outer life of the man and his destructive,
world-convulsing thoughts. Had the citizens
of Konigsberg surmised the whole significance
of these thoughts, they would have felt a more
profound awe in the presence of this man
than in that of an executioner. But the
good people saw in him nothing but a
professor of philosophy. " Nature," concludes
Heine, "had intended both Robespierre and
Kant to weigh out sugar and coffee; but
fate willed it otherwise, and into the scales
of one it laid a king, into those of the other
a god. And they both weighed correctly."

The view of Kant's teaching which Heine
suggests is of course deficient. Kant was
constructive as well as critical, and he laid
the foundations of a far greater conception
of God than any that he destroyed. The
figure of Immanuel Kant indeed is one of
the noblest in the history of spiritual life
on its moral as well as on its intellectual
side. His philosophy was far-reaching, alike
in practice and in theory. For he completely

KANT HIMSELF 125

divided the universe into tvro aspects, that
of the world of actual experience, where
necessity reigned and science held its sway,
and the other aspect of the moral world,
where the cardinal principle was that of
complete freedom and complete responsibility.
" Thou canst because thou oughtst." Between
science and religion there could be no conflict,
for each had its own sphere, and the two
spheres were absolutely and scientifically
marked off by a boundary line which could
not really be crossed. But in the hands of
Kant this distinction was to break down,
and in the third of his Critiques — that of
Judgment — he was driven to admit that,
confronted by even that aspect of things with
which experience through the senses furnishes
us, we find ourselves driven beyond the cate-
gories of mechanism to the qualification of
causes by ends, and perhaps even by the
supreme and ultimate fact of self-conscious-
ness. Yet, although this somewhat grudging
admission was to be seized on by his successors,
the value of his achievement in the Critical
Philosophy was not thereby diminished. He
bad succeeded in raising the entire level — in

126 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

bringing life into what had been a collection
of dry bones. He had restored the worlds
of moral obligation and of beauty to their
positions as real, though real in a different
way from the world of mechanism. He had
made for religion a place — within somewhat
narrow limits of pure reason it is true — but
still a place where it could find a firm
foundation and base a claim to authority
which science could not shake. And by
doing all this he had made possible a further
great work, that of the poets and the idealists
who were to dominate German thought for
the first half of the nineteenth century, and
to exercise a profound influence beyond the
confines of Germany.

In the hands of Fichte, Schelling, and
finally of Hegel, the Kantian philosophy
was profoundly transformed. A more widely
embracing meaning was given to self-con-
sciousness. Within its closed circle the
entire universe was brought as under a
supreme and final conception, and brought
as a connected whole. Thought and feeling
were no longer separated as though inde-
pendent existences, but were displayed as

FURTHER DEVELOPMENT 127

partial aspects of a single movement of mind.
The categories of intelligence were extended
in their scope and given an organic relation,
CO -extensive with the entire content of self-
consciousness, in which they found their
meaning and completion. The object world
was looked on as real in the same sense
as the subject world, and both as arising
by distinction within self-consciousness itself.
God was regarded as immanent, as a spirit
to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, and
not as an unknowable First Cause. Science,
morality, art, religion, were all assigned to
their parts in the movement of divine and
infinite self-consciousness, which was ever
realising itself in finite forms such as that
of the individual man. Yet that divine and
infinite self-consciousness was shown to imply
for its realisation the form of the finite, just
as, on its part, the finite had its foundation
and reality in God and God alone. Because
the higher categories of self-consciousness,
outside of which there was no meaning, even
for God himself, were above those of the
mechanism of which they were at once the
completion as well as the presupposition,

128 GREAT BRFrAIN AND GERMANY

no question of freedom arose. For the
ultimate reality was spiritual, and it is of the
essence of spirit to be free.

Such was the movement of the early part of
the nineteenth century on its philosophical side.
It was carried no doubt to great lengths
and excesses. But it was destined to influence
history profoundly, and, as a first step, a great
practical proof of the reality of its foundations
appeared almost at once in the world of art.
The spirit of ideaHsm was presently found to
be one which had extended beyond the phi-
losophers. Goethe and Schiller practised and
taught in another shape the same great
principles. They too passed beyond Kant,
and passed in the same direction as his
successors in the schools of philosophy. Now
that direction was not, as is often erroneously
said, from the living and concrete to the
abstract and lifeless. It has frequently been
made a reproach, not only against German
philosophy, but against Goethe himself, that
the highest and most abiding element in
human activity, the spiritual and living, was
ignored in the teaching of this time. To-day
the reproach has been brought forward, as

BERGSON 129

regards German idealism generally, in a
definite form ; and before an audience such as
this the reproach ought not to be passed by in
silence. The late Professor James of Harvard
and M. Bergson, already referred to, one of
the most distinguished of living philosophers,
have elaborated it. In two of his books, Les
donnees immediates de la Conscience and
L Evolution Creatrice, M. Bergson has drawn
a sharp distinction between knowledge, which
he declares to be always abstract and confined
to representation of what are really spatial
relations, and the direct consciousness of
creative evolution in a real time. To the
latter he refers us for the ''elan" which is the
true explanation of the development both of
the living world and of conscious mind itself.
Bergson's doctrine has been laid hold of as
something wholly new, and as putting investi-
gation on a quite fresh track. And his
doctrine is stated not only in a new form, but
with a wealth of scientific knowledge and a
lucidity of expression which justify for it a
claim to genuine originality. Yet the doctrine
of an inherent impulse, such as this great
French thinker seeks to establish, is in itself

I

130 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

no new one. German idealism itself at one
time laid great emphasis on it. Schopenhauer
has left no school to carry on his teaching, and
his books are to-day much less in evidence
than they once were. But he, too, found in
knowledge but a derivative phenomenon of a
deeper-lying nisus, which underlay the nature
of things and constituted their ultimate reality.
Unlike Bergson, he considered Time to be
merely a subjective form. In agreement with
Bergson, he regarded abstract Space as being
little more. But for him, also, the ulti-
mately real, that into which all else can be
resolved, while it is itself incapable of being
resolved at all, was not knowledge. Like
Kant, whose true successor he claimed to be,
he declined to recognise the domain of know-
ledge as absolute, but he went further and
resolved it into something deeper than itself.
This he called "WILL" ; and yet in the end he
was able to tell us of its nature, of the nisus or
striving of Will, no more than Bergson has
been able to tell us of his "creative impulse."
It is the less curious that German idealism
should have assigned, in the minds of certain
of its disciples, a subordinate reality to know-

GERMAN IDEALISM 131

ledge, when we reflect that not only had Kant
suggested an awareness of a raw material of
sensation as an irreducible element in cogni-
tion, but that Schelling and his school had,
later on, found the key to the discovery of the
nature of ultimate reality, not in knowledge,
but in what Schelling called ''Intellectual
Intuition," and in the somewhat obscure notion
of an Absolute which Hegel was presently to
deride as "the night in which all cows look
black."

It has been said with truth that wherever
there arises a great movement such as that of
German idealism, it is in danger, if its preachers
do not watch closely, of degenerating into an
abstract intellectuahsm, a tendency to reduce
the being of the universe to what has been
called ''a ballet of bloodless categories." The
strength of such intellectuahsm is that it
insists resolutely, as against such critics as
Schelling and Schopenhauer and M. Bergson
ahke, that words are useless unless an exact
meaning can be attached to them, and that
such a meaning can be assigned only in terms
of knowledge. Esse becomes in the end co-
extensive with intelligL But, on the other

132 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

hand, the weakness of such idealism is that
in the treatment of it by any but the greatest
writers it tends to get out of hand. Appar-
ently it need not do so. In its highest forms
German idealism did not separate thought
from feeling as if they were separate exist-
ences. On the contrary, they were for it only
correlative aspects of one single reality, the
actual and living content of self-consciousness.
In no form of self-conscious activity was
identity to be found except in and through
difference. Thought is no mere faculty of
abstract identification. Hegel himself adopted
the supposed Aristotelian maxim — Nihil est in
intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu» "The
contents of our consciousness," he says,
" remain one and the same, whether they are
felt, seen, represented, or willed, and whether
they are merely felt, or felt with an admixture
of thoughts, or merely and simply thought."
We thus reach a conclusion which will prove
to be of importance for the general purpose
of this address. The true tendency of the
idealism of Germany in the early part of the
nineteenth century was in the direction of
regarding the real as concrete and living, and

GOETHE 133

as immediate for consciousness just as much
as mediated in reflection. It is therefore not
surprising that, to begin with, in the great
poets of the period we find this characteristic
markedly prominent. Schopenhauer, over
whom Goethe had exercised much influence,
recognised it. Both he and Hegel agreed
with Goethe's great doctrine: —

" Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale,
Alles ist sie mit einem Male."

With Goethe this was no empty saying. In
his scientific work and his poetry alike he
never failed to insist on it. Nature was for
him something living, and reality was this
living process. The notion of creative evolu-
tion, to use M. Bergson's phrase, was the key
to his researches into the metamorphoses of
plants and to his general ideas of morphology.
The conception of a rigid mechanical universe
was abhorrent to him. When he wishes
Mephistopheles to mock at the student, he
makes him say : —

" Wer will was lebendig's erkennen und beschreiben,
Sucht erst den Geist heraus zu treiben,

I 2

134 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

Dann hat er die Theile in seiner Hand,
Fehlt leider nur das geistige Band,
Encheiresin Naturae nennt's die Chemie,
Spottet ihrer selbst und weiss nicht wie."

It is the same throughout. Life was for
Goethe the grand feature of the objective
universe, and observation and not abstract
scientific classification was the way to come
at it. That is one reason why he excelled in
lyric verse. In his lyrics he hardly ever
writes a line that does not embody the sense
of life. His maxim for mankind he puts in
his " Faust " into the lips of the Deity when
he makes him, in the prologue, apostrophise
men thus : —

" Doch ihr, die echten Gottersohne,
Erfreut euch der lebendig reichen Schone.
Das werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt,
Umfass euch mit der Liebe holden Schranken,
Und was in schwankender Erscheinung schwebt,
Befestiget mit daurenden Gedanken."

To me these words seem to be not only
profoundly characteristic of the idealistic
thought of Germany at the highest point it
touched. We shall see presently how the
principle was to be applied in the practical
life of the State.

GOETHE AND BISMARCK 135

I am aware that, as regards the philosophical
development, what I have expressed is not the
common opinion. But reflection on what the
great German idealists wrote has made me
think that this is the true view, and I refer to
it here because it bears on what comes after.
There is no incompatibility between the
passion for concrete and living reality, and the
passion for exhibiting it in a system. Goethe
himself had a thoroughly systematic mind,
and, as some of you at Oxford have pointed
out, Hegel was behind no philosopher, ancient
or modern, in his resolute refusal to separate
thought from things, the abstract from the
concrete, the continuous from the discrete,
and being from becoming.

System then, system necessarily in its first
aspect abstract, but system that has its
beginning and end in concrete life, this was
the intellectual inheritance of the German
nation from the philosophers and poets of the
early nineteenth century. Someone once said,
''Without Goethe, no Bismarck." It seems
to me that this saying is true. But its author
might have added that without the great
German thinkers there would also have been

136 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

no Scharnhorst, no Clause witz, no Eoon, and
no Moltke. There is hardly anything in the
history of modern Germany that illustrates
more thoroughly what has been called *'the
wonderful might of thought," than the
capacity it has developed for organisation.
An especially fine illustration is the organisa-
tion of the German military system. It began
after the battle of Jena. Prior to that
catastrophe German generals had ceased to
think. They had been content to adhere
blindly to the traditions they had inherited
from Frederick the Great. But these tradi-
tions belonged to a system which was of the
past, and was bound up with the personality
of an almost unique leader — one who could do
almost what he liked with his army, and who
had fashioned his strategy and his tactics and
his staff, not for all time, but to deal with the
special problem of his period, the problem
which he had in his day to solve.

In the pages of Von Treitschke's Bilder,
and especially in the chapter called '^ Der
Anfang des Befreiungskrieges,'' the story is
told of how the change came about. Von
Treitschke was a great writer of history. He

VON TREITSCHKE 137

describes with a vividness which recalls
Macaulay to the English student. He is
never more in his element than when he is
depicting the uprising against Napoleon in
1813. He tells us first of all of the inspiration
of Prussia by her statesmen, her soldiers, her
thinkers, and her poets. He draws the
picture of a nation penetrated by enthusiasm
and determination in every rank and every
phase of life. He describes how the national
energy was directed and organised by great
military leaders like Scharnhorst and Blucher.
And then he tells how a great army was
rapidly created, apparently by the people
themselves, with a single purpose, that of
delivering Prussia from the yoke of the
oppressor. The narrative never flags, the
historian remains at his high level throughout.
Napoleon is in the end driven out of Germany ;
then peace follows. For the rest we do not
need to turn to the pages of any particular
author. The inspiration of the spirit of
victory passed into a series of diverse writers.
Clausewitz shows us to what a high point of
literary as well as scientific excellence a great
military critic can attain. Th^ idealist

138 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

commentators on the history of the State
show the profound effect which a successful
effort at self-deliverance can exercise over even
the most abstract of philosophers. Every-
where German thought at this period discloses
the surroundings of the thinkers, and the
reality of the conception of the State which
was prevalent. The individual finds his best
and highest life as a citizen in the nation to
which he belongs. We have travelled far
from the comparatively recent teaching of
Kant. The general will has become much
more prominent than the individual will, and
government has revealed itself as the dominant
fact.

This state of mind could not last, but it
is a tribute to German tenacity in holding to
conceptions that it was to change as little as
it did. There came next a period in which
the abstract views of the school of the Left
prevailed over the school of the Eight wing.
It is not easy to realise that in founding a
revolutionary movement Marx and Lasalle
believed themselves to be carrying the torch
which Hegel had kindled. But they did
believe it. The new Aufkldrung held the field

PRACTICAL WORK IN GERMANY 139

for a considerable time. Germany gradually
turned from idealism to science, and in a less
but still marked degree to socialism. Her
literature became insignificant and her philo-
sophy lost its hold. But in science she
became stronger than ever, and in the faculty
of business organisation strongest of all. This
was natural. Nothing so recalls a people to
serious practical purposes as war does, with
the havoc which it plays with individual life,
and Prussia had a succession of wars. They
culminated in 1870, and Bismarck then was
free to turn his attention to industrial and
social organisation. Whatever criticism may
be passed on the policy Germany thought out
and adopted, at least it was a policy which had
been carefully considered. Since the days of
Friedrich List the avowed purpose of the
prevailing school of economists in Germany
had been to subordinate economic to national
considerations, and above all to the end of
German unification. This was the line which
Bismarck in the main consistently pursued.
For this purpose he introduced into the life of
the people organisation wherever he could.
In education, in military training, in her poor-

140 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

law, Germany began to stand out more and
more among the nations. Naturally a process
so far-reaching as that which Bismarck
developed was sure to be attended by its
Nemesis in the shape of reaction. And
reaction came. The social democrats on the
one hand, writers like Nietsche on the other,
and the modern spirit, in the shape of a freely
expressed criticism of the German school
system for the narrowness of the type it
produced, were inevitable. To glance in
passing at the illustration which German
education affords, it is odd to reflect that Eton
and Harrow, institutions which many people
here do not regard as free from grave defects,
have become much thought of in educational
circles in Germany. And why ? Not for the
learning they impart, but because in these and
other great public schools in England the real
rulers are seen to be the boys themselves, and
the tendency is to produce individuality and
the qualities which go to the making of leaders
of men.

In' these as in other matters it is only by
estimating things on balance that reliable
conclusions can be reached. The German

GERMAN EDUCATION 141

system of education has many advantages and
certain disadvantages. These last can be
mitigated if something of the English Public
School spirit can be introduced into Germany,
without sacrificing the enormous advantage
she has over us in the organisation in other
respects of her secondary schools. It is the
same with many other institutions. It is not
an unmixed good to a country to be over-
governed, and Germany is still probably too
much governed, for that free development of
individuality which is characteristic of life here
and in the United States. But this must not
be taken to mean that the order which prevails
in so many departments of German social life
is not a great advantage to her, and one which
ought, as far as possible, to be preserved if
she ever, in her constitutional development,
approximates more nearly to our models. In
many ways we ourselves are rapidly adopting,
with the modifications that the national habit
of mind makes inevitable, German examples.
I do not mean only in such fields as that of
National Insurance, although that is not a bad
illustration, but in other directions. I am at
present much occupied as Chairman of a Royal

142 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

Commission that is sitting on University
Education in London, and I am much struck
by the growing influence of German University
methods that is apparent in the evidence of the
numerous expert witnesses we have examined.
In this direction and in technical education
the Teutonic spirit is moving among us, but
moving in a fashion that is on the whole our
own. And, on the other hand, Germany
herself is learning something from us. She is
studying our methods of colonial development
and applying them. And she is watching,
what is a characteristic feature of our national
life, our vigorous local government. Moreover,
she is herself altering in her habits of thought
and feeling. The period of materialism and of
reaction from idealism seems to be passing.
The negative influence of Schopenhauer and
Nietsche seems to be spending itself. Nothing
very definite has yet emerged in the form of a
prevailing characteristic. But it is well to
note that there are indications in many direc-
tions of a revival of the influence of the out-
look on life of Goethe and the great idealists.

Two years ago a book appeared in Germany
which contained several things which im-

WINDELBAND 143

pressed me a good deal. It was a reprint of
five addresses delivered by one of the best
known of modern historians of philosophy and
literature — Professor Windelband of Heidel-
berg. In this work, which he published under
the title of Die Philosophie im Deutschen
Geisteslehen des XIX. Jahrhunderts, Professor
Windelband traces the course of German
thought, in the poets as well as the meta-
physicians and moralists, through the century
that is just over. He shows how the creed
of Eomanticism had its form profoundly
modified by the growth of a demand for a
practical application to life. " Die Forderung
der Tat,'' he says, became " Wirklich der
Weisheit letzter Schluss, zu dem sick die
Philosophie wie die Dichtung hekannteJ' He
points out that, just as Schleiermacher tried
to give religion a practical significance for the
lives and deeds of educated people, so Hegel
summoned them from their dreams to realise
themselves in the performance of their duties
to the State. This fruitful period was suc-
ceeded by one of materialism and pessimism,
which again, under Positivist habits of mind,
gave way to the standpoint of science, and

144 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

especially of psychology. The larger signifi-
cance of the historical method was forgotten.
*'Just at the moment," says the Professor,
"when we Germans had begun to make
history, we ceased to wish to know anything
of history." The powerful personality of a
man of genius, Bismarck, had created the
German Empire ; his call for the exercise of a
national will found a response in all directions,
and the impulse to volition rather than specula-
tion, to action and creation became dominant.
" Wir wissen zii viel, wir wollen zu wenig,
Aus dem Lernvolk soil ein Tatvolk werden;''
so people began to declare all round.

But at this stage Windelband points out that
a new tendency made itself felt. Democracy
seemed to begin to move with giant strides.
The masses realised that for the attainment of
practical results knowledge was power — and
the schoolmaster a veritable leveller-up. The
workmen demanded participation in what had
been the privilege of leadership of the classes.
Social problems became increasingly attractive,
and there was apparent a tendency to regard
it as possible to look on all men as alike who
had attained to a certain standard of learning.

NIETSCHE 145

This tendency, he says, produced an almost
immediate reaction. The fear arose that the
unique value and quality of personality might
be overlooked, and even lost to the nation.
Personality in thought, in art, in action, had
been the main source of the strength of the
German nation, and now it seemed that a
movement was on foot to reduce individuality
to a dead level on the demand of the masses.
He tells us how the protest against this
demand assumed its first form in art, and how
the strongest expression of the struggle of
individuality to free itself from the crushing
and levelling power of the masses, came from
Nietsche. This, he says, was the secret of the
hold which Nietsche got over great numbers of
his countrymen. But Nietsche's was a too
brutal insistence on the right of the " overman "
to dominate. It was an Umwertung oiler
Werte, It confused the national ideas of
value and moral worth, and it could not last.
A yet more modern tendency has, declares the
Professor, set in in Germany. The demand
has been made that philosophy shall show the
way to a better and more real appreciation of
moral values of a permanent kind, the kind

K

146 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

that has, amid the changing interests of the
period, an abiding foundation in a higher
spiritual reahty. The rule of the masses has
increased, and is increasing so far as the things
of outward life are concerned. What is needed
is a strong and heightened personal life that
can win back and preserve its own spiritual
inwardness. Thus there is apparent in
Germany a new tendency to return to the
great systems of idealism which have pro-
claimed the spiritual foundation of all reality.
It is not with the transitory forms of the old
effort at logical construction that educated
opinion is concerning itself. The abstract
formulas of the old metaphysic no longer
interest the general student. But he has
begun to realise once more the splendid and
convincing power with which the great German
thinkers disentangled from a mass of historical
material the permanent basis of moral and
intellectual values, and brought to the general
consciousness a significance in these values
that is beyond the level of what is transitory
or merely utilitarian. The relation of the
self-conscious and self-developing individual to
the community is the new problem, and the

DEMOCRACY 147

great question is how the infinite value of the
individual inner life, and the claims of the
society of which the individual is a member
and on which he is dependent, are to be
reconciled. This is the task which modern
Germany has set to philosophy and art, and
on the solution they offer will depend the
question whether they are considered worthy
of their mission.

Such is the view of modern Germany set
before us by Professor Windelband as lately
as two years ago. With us in Great Britain
the state of things is not quite the same.
Democracy is no doubt advancing, and with
even greater strides than across the German
Ocean. But although there is a growing
demand for education, there is, I think, a
greater disposition here among the masses to
regard the man who already possesses it as in
a class apart. It is a possession less familiar
to our people. They have never been led by
fighting philosophers such as were Marx and
Lassalle. The professors of political economy
do not come on the side of the movement
towards Socialism as freely as is the case in
Germany. Nor, on the other hand, is the cry

148 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

against socialistic legislation a battle-cry of
our political strife to anything like the same
extent. And yet the two democracies have,
in vital points, such as the desire that the
State should insist on better conditions of life
for those who work with their hands, much
in common. It is one of the most reliable
foundations for the hope of better and more
intimate relations between the two countries
in the days to come that this should be so.
The German democracy would doubtless follow
its rulers to war, as would in all probability
the democracy here. But both democracies
are more and more influencing the policy of
these rulers, as the German Chancellor pointed
out in a speech made not long ago ; and neither
democracy regards war in any other light than
that of a calamity. A marked and growing
interest in pressing forward the demand for
the solution of social problems is a guarantee
of peace. The more intimate the knowledge
of each other's afiairs becomes in the case of
the two nations, the better for everybody.
But the process cannot be a very rapid one.
The difference of temperament is partly racial
and partly due to other reasons.

THE COMMON MISSION 149

I have tried in what I have written above
to disentangle the genesis and growth of some
differences of mental habit and tradition which
make it difficult for Englishmen and Germans
fully to understand each other. If my analysis
is even approximately right, there is room for
the citizens of both countries to become less
keenly conscious than at present of each other's
infirmities. In the great mission of civilising
the world, in its commercial and industrial
development, in the production and exchange
of goods, in science, in literature, in art, the
two nations have many opportunities and
aptitudes in common. Theirs is a mission
and a duty in the discharge of which rivalry
might well be stingless. It were a thousand
pities if peaceful co-operation in work so
manifold and so great, and so much in the
interest of the world as a whole, were marred
or even impeded by unnecessary suspicions.
And yet the marring and the hindering are
often to be witnessed. They arise mainly
from what is the source of most of the evils
of life, ignorance and want of forbearance.
Given fuller knowledge, and that capacity
for self-restraint should quickly and surely

150 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

operate, which, among educated races, gener-
ally checks the tendencies to diverge coming
from difference of temperament. Still even this
capacity cannot always be reckoned on. There
are many Englishmen and Germans who have
knowledge, and who practise this self-restraint.
But there are still more, even among the highly
educated classes, who in varying degrees fail
to do so. I have seen a good many illustra-
tions of mischief arising from the want of the
practice. Some of those that were least
important in themselves have left with me
the most vivid impressions. I have witnessed
in business relations the shortcoming in this
respect of able men of both countries. I used
to see it in the days when I was at the Bar,
and I now sometimes see the same shortcom-
ing illustrated in public affairs. I have noticed
cases in which Germans have misjudged the
meaning of British policy. And I have
observed English politicians at times apt either
unduly to suspect the supposed particular
intentions of German statesmen, or alterna-
tively to think that good may be done by
indulging in vague and sentimental appeals to
them. Now German policy is largely influ-

GERMAN CHARACTERISTICS 151

enced by Prussia. It is the habit of mind of
Prussians to begin by defining a principle and
then to test everything by it. They are not
fond of gush, and are surprised if anyone
doubts that the natural point of departure
should naturally be to lay down clearly as a
preliminary to discussion what they hold to be
the interest of Germany. It is well to realise
this habit of thought, and to take account of
it. To ignore it is only to get ourselves mis-
understood, and probably supposed to be con-
cealing some hidden counter-policy. German
habits of thinking in abstract terms, even
when dealing with the most immediate and
practical aflfairs, and of looking for principles
everywhere, make things at times trying for
those who have not this useful if difficult habit
of mind in the same degree.

Then the German language is another cause
of hindrance to Englishmen. It is in a high
measure precise, but it does not lend itself like
French, or even like English, to the expression
of nuances. And when it appears in a trans-
lation, the nuances are generally not there at
all, and the meaning is apt to seem harsh.
I wish all our politicians who concern them-

152 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

selves with Anglo-German relations, those
who are pro-German as well as those who are
not, could go to Berlin and learn something,
not only of the language and intellectual
history of Prussia, but of the standpoint of
her people — and of the disadvantages as well
as the advantages of an excessive lucidity of
conception. Nowhere else in Germany that
I know of is this to be studied so advan-
tageously and so easily as in Berlin, the seat
of government, the headquarters of Real-
politiky and it seems to me most apparent
among the highly educated classes there. It
would be a good thing to get more under-
standing of personal equations than is current
amongst us Englishmen. If judges and
merchants and diplomatists can be led into
wrong impressions, how much more are the
multitudes here, who have no direct knowledge
of foreign habits of mind, likely to make
mistakes. And what is true of us is true of
the Germans themselves. We also have some
admirable qualities which are obscured by our
other characteristics. It requires life among
us, and knowledge of our ways and of our
language, to disentangle the true relation and

NATIONAL FRIENDSHIPS 153

character of these qualities. If the process is
once started it is not difficult to continue.
Frenchmen and Kussians now appreciate us
more than they did, simply because improved
international relations have at last led them to
look for our good qualities rather than to look
on our deficiencies. A similar change for the
better has even now come over our relations
with our relatives in the United States.
What an excellent thing it would be for the
peace of the world if the process were to set
in all round, so that just as we and the French
and the Eussians and the Americans have
found a strong inclination to look for and
believe in the best in each other, the same
tendency were to set in as between the
Germans and ourselves. There is no
apparently insuperable reason why in forming
a new friendship we should not carry on other
and older friendships, and carry them with us
into the new one to the profit of everyone
concerned. Such a change might not super-
sede considerations of self-defence, but its
tendency would probably be in the direction
of lightening the financial burdens which these

entail.

h

154 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

What is wanted is, then, education in
mutual understanding. That is why this
gathering at Oxford is of more than local
importance. I can think of few things more
desirable for the world at this moment than
that England and Germany should come to
understand each other. But such mutual
understanding is not possible excepting on the
basis of study, and the knowledge that is born
of it. On the whole, I think we are more
deficient in this study than are the Germans.
They know our literature and our history
much better than we do theirs. Shakespeare
and Scott are almost as familiar to them as
they are to ourselves. For one Briton that
can read and speak German there are five
Germans that can read and speak English.
On the other hand, they seem to me to know
almost less of our way of looking at things
than we do of theirs. We are not really a
nation that conceals deep-laid plans and
selfish schemes under the guise of obscurity
in word and deed. We do not seek, as of
set principle and purpose, to annex more and
more of the surface of the earth in advance of
all others. What we have actually done in

THE POSITION OF GERMANY 155

this direction we have done — not as the
outcome of any preconceived and thought-out
policy, but because for a long time we were
the only people on the spot, and because at
the moment it was the obvious thing to do,
and we were the only people ready to do it.
Germany seems to me to have had one
particular piece of ill luck, the misfortune of
having been born as a nation a hundred years
late in the world's history. The fact has
modified the form of what otherwise would
have been her mode of development. But it
need not materially hamper her progress.
She is already one of the greatest nations in
the world in virtue of character and intel-
lectual endowment. Her power of organisa-
tion is unrivalled. She has high standards of
excellence in her methods, and great aptitude
for what is actual and concrete. She is
penetrating everywhere, and to the profit of
mankind. Nothing is likely to keep her back
— and I think I may add that nothing is so
likely to smooth her path as really frank and
easy relations, in commerce, in politics, in
society, with this country. For some of us —
a great many of us — believe that the greater

156 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

the trade and commerce of Germany the
greater will be our trade and commerce. Co-
operation in development is a great factor for
all concerned.

No doubt there are subjective difficulties.
I have already referred to those occasioned by
the barrier erected by the peculiarities of the
German language. It possesses advantages
but it also possesses disadvantages, and causes
somewhat of a gulf between the German and
his foreign neighbours. One cannot, however
appreciative one may be of things German,
but make certain complaints of this language.
The verb is remote from the substantive, and
is a sore trial to the foreigner. The Gothic
type and the Kursw-Schrift are oppressions
to the foreign eye. In the hands of a bad
writer this language is a burden even to the
student. Carlyle himself, a real admirer of
German literature, has to say in his Frederick
the Great that "German to this day is a
frightful dialect for the stupid, the pedant, and
the dullard sort. Only in the hands of the
gifted does it become supremely good." But
I sometimes think that even the Germans
themselves do not appreciate the power that

HEINE AGAIN 157

is latent in their language of being made
admirable for all purposes when the pen is
that of a great master of style. I do not
speak of the lyric. We all know that for the
purposes of lyrical poetry German has hardly
a rival. I speak of prose. I again refer for
an illustration to Heinrich Heine. When I
visit Dlisseldorf it is with sadness that I see
no mark to show that the town is proud of its
association with his name. He was trying at
times. He laughed at his countrymen. But
then he laughed at us Englishmen also, and
perhaps he laughed most of all at the French.
He really knew and loved Germany, and yet
Germany can hardly be said to appreciate him,
and this the fact notwithstanding that he
wrote German prose as perhaps no other ever
has. We have learned to marvel at the young
Goethe, who before he was twenty-six had
produced much of his greatest work, the Ur-
Faust, Goetz, Werthe7\ and some of the finest
of his lyrics. But of Heine we hear little in
Germany. I think it is a sign of a certain
want of open-mindedness that Germany does
not fully appreciate this unique figure — the
man who knew so much and said it so dis-

L 2

158 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

tinctly in such perfect words. In Heine St
Beuve has his rival in delicacy of appreciation.
The language of Renan is not more exquisitely
graceful and precise. And yet there is, so far
as I know, no important memorial to him in
Germany — not even in Diisseldorf, his birth-
place.

We are all prone to the unconsciousness
which comes from being narrow, we here in
England at least as much as our neighbours.
We overlook, for instance, that in the nine-
teenth century we produced two literary
figures and two only of European reputation,
Byron and Scott. Byron never attained to
maturity, and Scott is full of padding. So is
Goethe for that matter, at least the Goethe of
later life. But Germany in the end of the
eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
century had her Elizabethan age — so far as
literature and philosophy were concerned.
How much poorer would the whole world be
but for this period of German life in which
she for the time outstripped every other
country ! Yet even then she indulged in
tendencies which needed correction ; and if she
had listened to Heinrich Heine they might

CONCLUSION 159

have been corrected and the outlook enlarged.
And now the revanche is in progress, much as
Heine predicted, and, looking at the German
railway bookstalls, I can see that a Gallic
spirit is advancing on Berlin. It need not
have been so and it should not have been so,
and Heine told of a better way. Had his
counsel been listened to, there ought to have
been no Nietsche period — so at least it seems
to a foreigner.

I repeat that we English are apt to be
narrow. We provoke the world by our
apparent unconsciousness of the transitory
nature of national institutions. Change is the
order of the day. What will the world be
like a hundred years hence ? No one can
foresee. Can the centralised Russian Empire
hold together in the face of the march of
civilisation, and the progress of Japan and
China also? Will not these countries afiford
examples which will be followed outside their
own boundaries? Will the German Empire
a hundred years hence be anything hke what
it is to-day? And how will it be with the
British Empire? Few people suppose that,
even if George the Third had not been fooUsh,

160 GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY

the United States would have remained bound
up with us and subject to a centralised
Government. Some of us are quite aware
that with Canada and Australia and New
Zealand and South Africa the same difficulty
might well arise unless great care is taken.
Few people now talk of a rigid system of
Imperial Federation on the old lines of a
quarter of a century since. The proposition
would be an anachronism and too dangerous.
If Canada, for example, were to develop
eighty millions of a population, could we
remain with her under any sort of apparently
written or rigid system ? Possibly ! It all
depends how elastic the system really was, how
light the reign of common Government, and
how complete the autonomy of the Canadians.
By learning to see things as others see them
we may put off, perhaps for an indefinite
period, days which, if there were constraint
or lack of intelligence, would be inevitable.
And that is why we do well to study the
lesson of how to understand our neighbours
all round, those who speak Enghsh and those
who speak German, and to try to correct

CONCLUSION 161

certain insular traits of mind which are
characteristic of us.

The Greeks used to say that the knowledge
of self is the hardest to gain of all kinds of
knowledge, and this is as true of nations as
it is of individuals. But it is surely worth
while to make the effort to gain the know-
ledge. For it may help us to secure that
in the particular case we are considering,
that of Germany and Great Britain, neither
of two great nations shall fail to realise the
magnitude of its responsibility for the under-
standing and appreciation of the other.

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THE KING'S CUSTOMS. An Account of Maritime
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INDIAN PROVINGE. By Sir Theodore Morison, K.G.I.E.,

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THE ECONOMIC IRANSITION IN INDIA.

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as India. In the last two chapters he discusses the alleged " drain" of wealth
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burning controversy, but which has not hitherto been scientifically examined.

STUDIES OF INDIAN LIFE AND SENTI-

MENT. By Sir Bampfylde Fuller, K.G.S.I., CLE. With
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World.

INDIA AND TIBET. By Colonel Sir Francis

Younghusband, K.C.I.E. With Maps and Illustrations. Medium
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literature about Tibet."— Times.

LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Pathway to Reality

THE GIFFORD LECTURES, 1902-1904

2 Vols. Large Crown 8vo. 10s, 6d, net each

Vol. I.— The Meaning of Reality.— The Criticism of Categories.
Vol. II.— Absolute Mind.

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DESCARTES : His Life and Times, by Elizabeth S.
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LUCRETIUS : Epicurean and Poet. By John Masson,
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